Hi! The Book Wyrm here. Thank you for the feature, really looking forwards to watching this soon. Also, to clarify: this version of the puzzle was not set in 90 minutes. The version set in 90 minutes had an error at the start, so I edited and improved it after to reach this version (so probably 2.5-3 hours of total setting time to get this). Most of the logic is the same as the first one, up until the ending part (once the 22 and 32 cages become relevant).
I solved it, but the ruleset hurt my head and made me back track many many times. Total solve time: WAY TOO LONG, lol. I did enjoy the puzzle, but I kept mixing up cage sums and difference sums. I finally had to pull out a notepad and take notes so I could figure things out without mistakes. I did fancy how it had you bouncing around from cage to cage, across the board and back with partner cells. Thanks for the given pairing, btw! I doubt it's solvable without those two given digits. lol Also, all the math slowed me down drastically, too. I can't do this math in my head so easily. How you set this puzzle, I'll never understand, but bravo!
I agree. Very wholesome. I just don’t watch as much these days as I would like. I must admit the ads are too much but on some days I’ll endure them and watch
I thought the same about 300,000 when the channel was approaching that. I’ve been watching daily for years and I’m sure I’ll be around when the channel approaches a million too. 😊
I'll add a bit of lore to this puzzle, if I may. From March through May this year, I held a 32-player bracket tournament (akin to March Madness in the US) in the Sudoku Skunkworks. The format was that each setter selected a constraint to use against their opponent for the round, and they didn't know which constraint their opponent picked until they started their 90-minute setting timer. For the quarterfinal round, The Book Wyrm selected this "Colourful Killers" constraint, and their opponent (Myxo) selected rotational pairs. So, not only did The Book Wyrm set a version of this puzzle in 90 minutes, but they also had to figure out how rotational pairs would interact with colourful killers *within that same 90 minutes*! Truly mind blowing, if you ask me.
Thank you so much for sharing that!! Couldn't imagine the 32 setters involved and all the absolutely phenomenal puzzles that were created! Able to share who was pitted in the Final against each other and who won?
So both setters then had the same 2 constraints ‘stacked’ on top of each other for their 90-minute session? Or I set using your constraint and you set using my constraint? Also, this seems like fun! How were winners from each round decided? Solve time? Set time? Judging for quality of puzzle? Something else?
I realised during your Reddit video from yesterday, that RU-vid has been so efficient in recommending every one of your videos, that I didn’t realise i wasn’t subscribed. Glad to say that has been rectified and that RU-vid is keeping up the good work
That had something to do with you, too. Because, there was a channel that I unsubscribed to (there's probably 20 million subscribers by now), but I haven't got a notification for that channel in years. So, it definitely had to do with you tuning-in. Good job. (Yes, to you, not the RU-vid algorithm) 😆
Simon, your personality is why i subscribed to this channel! I have watched every Simon video since the start of the lockdowns and probably 90% of Marks videos. In my humble opinion, this channel should be the number one channel on RU-vid 😊
Great to see the channel growing. If everyone who watches just gives the videos a 'like' when you start watching (so you don't forget at the end like I'm often guilty of!) it would be great to help get them to the next milestone!
I can't even begin to use the logic Simon uses in his solves, and I consider myself smart. But even if I wouldn't ever be capable of solving such puzzles, I get so happy watching Simon smile, call me his favorite people, or say "aaaah" on one of his epiphanies. Thank you, Simon, for keeping me company for at least 1 hour a day.
Thank you Simon for coloring properly in the end ^_^. I'll never shout at you. Actually, it is amazing that thanks to your explanations, I can seldomly jump to the conclusion faster than you do, even thu I cannot solve the puzzle by myself. You are a wonderfull teacher !
Very proud of my deduction with the red cage - when you had 125 in the cage in box 7, it was only possible for it to map to 345, cos if it mapped to 245, 3 wouldn't have a partner. I think that was simpler than the way Simon got there. I'm quite good at little deductions like that after Simon has done a load of hard work first!
I reached the same deduction using the 2. 2 can't map onto itself, and if the 1 in box 7 maps to a 2 in box 3, then the 2 in box 7 must map onto 4, meaning 2 maps onto two different digits, breaking the pairs constraint
You don’t even need that deduction, it should be obvious based on the middle box that every digit must have a different digit as a partner except 5, so once the 8 cage became 125 the red one had to be 345.
Not necessarily. 125 could map to 125 by the pure ruleset, if 1 and 2 are pairs. But yeah, there couldn't ever have been ONE match between the digits in the lower tuple.
@@davidholt4327yes, but at that stage 125 was not an option for box 3 because the cage's sum needed to equal either 11 or 12, making 245 / 345 the only options. Since 2 can't be both paired up with 1 and 4, and can't reference itself, the only viable option was 345.
Gotta come back later with 🍿and 🍷!!! Excited to see you reach 600,000 subscribers!!! Your personality is a major plus, Simon!! I watch even when I don’t even understand the puzzles and they are way over my ability!! And the reason is you and your engaging personality!! And the lovely people who comment (looking at you, David and Emily)!
What an incredible puzzle. I cannot begin to imagine how someone goes about setting something like this. Mind blowing. I was feeling pretty pleased with myself that I'd got all the central box logic at the start, that Simon had found by around the half hour mark of his solve, but then I hit a brick wall and couldn't see how to progress. I had to watch Simon for a tip on the way forward. Ruling out the two cell cage r7c56 from ending in 5 was the hint I needed. (Although, initially I thought it would be blue if it summed to 10 too, as I momentarily confused ending with 5 as the same as being divisible by 5. Doh! For a brief moment I thought Simon had overlooked something important, then I realised my error.) I managed to solve the rest from that point on, though, with no more help from the video. I'm more than happy with that.
At the 34:40 mark (where the purple cage would be summing to 21 and the yellow cage to 12), a quicker way to disprove this is that a 3-cell 21 must include at least two of 6, 7, 8, and 9. Those digits map onto each other, so you'd have a 3-cell 12 that includes at least two of 6, 7, 8, and 9. That's too much.
CTC geniuses through and through. This is certainly my new addiction for 2024 (hence why every time I open the page, I pronounce the channel "Crack In The Cryptic". Simon/Mark -- have you ever considered talking to the setters about making short videos the do one or both of the following: 1) describe how they set the puzzle, and 2) walk through how they thought the solve would go ?? I think it would be really fun, especially after I have given it my best try, used your solve video to aide me along the way, and then still faffed my way to errors of many varieties. I think the setter videos would be a truly enjoyable companion and a tribute to that portion of this puzzling nirvana. Thanks for this whole world you are sharing with us. I am really enjoying it.
An alternate version to get the deduction at 54:40, which I found much easier to see: If the top cage had a 2, then 2 can't partner with 5, and can't partner with itself, so must partner with 1. But then the 4 in the top cage has no way to partner with a digit in the bottom cage; it obviously can't partner with 5, and it can't partner with 2 or 1, because they partner with each other. So the top cage cannot contain a 2 (and that also eliminates the possibility of a 12 or 34 pairing altogether).
I finished in 429 minutes. I was able to get the 5 in the center rather quickly and despite realizing that it is the full cage that touches the cage that gets added up, I proceeded to only take the first cell that orthogonally touched. It turns out that you can get quite far in the puzzle. I was an hour and a half in before realizing that and had to practically start over where I put the 5 in. Then, I spent another couple hours desperately trying to figure it out and unable to do so. I gave up and started to watch the video, before seeing Simon reiterate the rules that no same ending total will count. This completely disambiguated my 31 cage, since 1234 had to equal 5. I spent too long trying to find the trick, only for it to be revealed that it was just the rules of the puzzle that I missed. After that, the ending was still not easy, but at least it was doable. This one was rough in many ways for me. Great Puzzle!
Simon, be (non-spoilet) warned: the thing with the (truly wonderful) Braid is that some levels require a combination of both ingenious thinking AND very difficult gameplay. Enough that you can't tell whether it's your thinking or your gameplay that is lacking. A lot like today's puzzle! Both were at the limits of my abilities.
Lovely setting, Book Wyrm and great solve, Simon! An alternative way to see the mapping is to consider the 8 cage and the red cage at the 50 minute mark; if you know that you have 1,2,5 in the 8 cage, then you cannot have a 2 in red cage, because 2 cannot map to itself, and if 1 mapped to 2, then you'd need to put a 1 in the red cage in order to get a 2 in the 8 cage in the first place, and you can't. Therefore, you get a 1,2,5 eight cage, and a 345 red cage.
Whoa, that was so complicated to me, i got stuck multiple times early on and had to wait for a clever thought of simon to catch up and continue but in the end i managed to complete it with _most_ of the logic actually being found by myself. Granted i would have never completely solved it on my own, but just how do you even come up and set this in 90 minutes, it took me hours to solve WITH help 😂
At 54:42 you finish some very complex logic to figure out the composition of the red box and the 1-2-5 blue box. But it is as simple as "if 2 is in the red box then it must pair with itself (against the rules/box 5) or 1 (which would then put a 1 in the red box)". There is no need to use any other info than the 1-2-5 box and the red box.
Dear Simon, Your personality is one of the reasons I have stayed. Don't talk yourself down like that. I love being one of your favourite people, makes me smile a little every time.
I eventually finished with tons of help from the video. I'd guess I figured out 25%-50% of the logic but completely misunderstood the rules at times and even then it was brutally difficult to make headway at times. That said it was a beautifully set with very unique logic that mostly escaped me.
49:05: "And now I know its composition: it's 1, 2, 5" And that actually also tells us the last two mappings and the sum and composition of the rotationally symmetric (red) cage, from which follow the sum of the yellow cage and, by extension, the sum of the two-cell pink cage as well as the compositions of the green and orange cages (though not which of them contains which composition): We know the red cage contains a 5 (that maps to itself), a 4 (that must now map to either 1 or 2) and either a 2 or a 3 (that must map to the remaining digit from 1 and 2). Now let's assume for a moment that 4 maps to 1. In that case, the eight-cage only contains a 2 that doesn’t map to a different digit yet. We know it can't map to itself because only one digit does that as per the rules, and that digit is already 5. So by eliminiation, in this scenario, 2 has to map to 3. Alternatively, if we make the initial assumption that 4 maps to 2, we are left with a 1 in the eight-cage that doesn't map to anything else yet. It can now no longer map to 2, because 2 already maps to 4. So the only remaining digit that it can map to is 3. It follows logically that, no matter whether 4 maps to 1 or 2, the composition of the red cage is always 3, 4, 5, so it always sums to 12. That tells us that the yellow cage sums to 13, from which follows that the two-cell pink cage sums to 8. We can do even better than that, though: no matter whether that 8 is made by summing 1 and 7 or by summing 2 and 6, we know that the two-cell pink cage definitely *doesn't* contain 1, 6 or 2, 7. IF it contained either of those combinations, the grey cage would have to contain 8, 4 or 9, 3 respectively, telling us that, in this scenario, 1 would map to 4 and 2 to 3. Since this scenario is definitely WRONG, we know that the actual mappings have to be 1 3 and 2 4 instead. So now we have completed all of the mappings. From this we can make another (minor) deduction about the orange and green cages. We already knew that neither of them can contain 1, 4 or 2, 3, since that would mean they sum to 5, which they specifically DON'T. We now also know that neither of them can contain 1, 3 or 2, 4, because those pairs map to each other. So if one out of the orange and green cages contained 1 and 3, then the other one would *also* contain 1 and 3, which would mean they couldn't possibly sum to 10 (and the same applies to 2 and 4). That tells us that one of the cages HAS to contain 1, 2 and the other HAS to contain 3, 4. Without knowing which is which, that doesn't tell us too much at this point, but it is progress at least.
really hit the sweet spot in terms of difficulty for me. the ruleset sounds crazy, but I struggle with most of the harder puzzles on this channel and this one was surprisingly manageable.
That was hard and felt totally bonkers at first ;) Thank you @TheBookWyrm438 for this magnificent puzzle! Kudos to Simon for always managing to grasp key puzzle logic in a short time (yet going the long way around for easier deductions, but that's another story 😅). I mean, while coloring the "first box" wasn't too hard, the real break-in was the next step, i.e. how cage sums could and could not map with each others. It felt quite rewarding to understand it, especially after half an hour sitting there thinking about it.
I started and when I tried to make some deductions and realized that I couldn't figure out anything because the deductions I tried to make were cancelled out by the rules. I'm watching Simon try because I'm not torturing myself with this.
65:45 Utterly brilliant and so difficult. Instincts kept wanting to use the cage totals directly and I found myself having to force backtracks for that too often. Such a clever concept and extremely well put together.
Me: yells at the screen whenever Simon misses obvious stuff. Also me: adds literally 1 hour+ of solve time because doesn't notice 7 or 9 in box 2 can be disambiguated based on its already known color.
I managed to get just under the hour, but I made life a little more difficult for myself by not noting all pairs had the same difference, so I had to calculate a lot of the sums from first principles to exclude 5s from some sums.
That pretty much took me all night, but it was a very cool puzzle. I had to rethink things a few times too and made a stupid mistake in the middle and had to redo some things.
I did it but, as usual, I got bogged down in the middle for a few days before finding what I'd missed. I did a few things in different orders than you, which left me too many options here and there, but I got there in the end.
"No maverick... If my office is bugged we are about to get a visit" Tell us you don't know flying without telling us you don't know flying. Maybe it's you who waits for maverick to prepare his plane for youtube content.
Spoilers Felt so clever realizing that there was no way the red cage could contain a 2, because that would mean 2's partner is a 1 (as it can't be a 2 or a 5), which would force any cage opposite a 1/2/5 triple to be a 1/2/5 triple itself.
102:29 with a bit of trial and error. There are some really cool deduction lines, but I just got lost in the last part and ended up trying something that looked good.
If you're wanting to help with the algorithm, it helps if you like the video, and leave a comment. Heck, it even helps if you give the video a thumbs down and leave a negative comment. (I don't recommend that; I'm just saying.)
I skipped this one, it just looked like too much speculative tests were required to make even a little progress, and watching the first part of the solve didn't change my mind. I prefer logical deductions, not juggling permutations. I'm not criticizing the puzzle, it's just not for me.
Sadly, whilst clever logic is Impressive, if you can’t even understand the rule set it really spoils the experience. This is a great channel, and most of the time I love the puzzles and watching you solve them, but this is a rare dislike purely because of the seemingly impenetrable rules.
This is one of the worst puzzles you've had, and your solve was painful to watch. Please actually do Sudoku when you're doing sudoku, and if you've got rotational symmetry in a puzzle, your solve would go a lot faster if you paid attention to filling in the numbers once you figure out what one is. This one was disappointing.
Really cool puzzle. I stopped watching about 20 minutes in, to catch the end of the PWHL Finals game (well, then I got sleepy and didn't stay up for the second overtime) but found myself thinking obsessively about what the next step would be. Figured out by morning, picked up the video again, watch Simon make that deduction 7000 times faster than I did, and will watch the rest of it later. Elegant rules! (Oh, and my team won. On to game 5 for all the marbles!) 😺💚🏒
23:30 It's amazing how Simon deduces the obvious with far-fetched reasoning : looking at the central box, how could ever 1 match to 1 ? or any other 'low' digit for that matter ?
Blimey, this was a toughie, nearly broke me, like a butterfly on a wheel, but glad to see that in fact I didn't take that much longer than Simon. It just felt like it did. And what an inventive idea, and to set this in 90 hours would be an achievement in my eyes.
Finished in 96:59. Was tough going trying to figure out how the cages worked, but after some thinking, I was able to figure it out. I found out though that the 180 degree symmetry was vital to solving the cages, but then I promptly forgot about the symmetry when finally filling out everything which caused a pretty big delay even after I had figured out most of the cages :p. Fun and challenging puzzle!
