Nordy and I have been waiting to see when Simon would get to say the name "Nordyttrio" 😃. Fantastic solve as always, finding all of the major intended logical steps along the solve path! We were both just as astounded as everyone else that the puzzle managed to not only have a unique solution with just the given clues, but also that it managed to have a logical, flowing solve path.
Is it a required step to mark r6c4 as non-snake? It seemed important in my solve, and Simon got stuck until he proved it (though I got there through its effect on the head and thus breaking the 4-viewing square).
@@rebmcr It's possible to make sufficient progress without needing that deduction. The key deduction around that point in the solve is that the snake must go down into at least r5c6. With that, it's possible to get the snake shape in box 5 by simple non-loop and non-branching deductions.
A fantastic construction / discovery that I really enjoyed solving myself. This sort of snake building puzzle is right up my street. Absolutely remarkable how few clues were needed, great work both of you
A little bit interesting that it's stated that the snake can touch itself diagonally, but then it doesn't. I suppose stating that it can't touch itself diagonally would have made a couple steps trivially easy.
Why isn't the snake green?! I realize not all snakes are green but are many times depicted that way AND this one was also a German Whisper line. HUGE missed opportunity... (insert sarcasm) 😂.
Simon doesn't fit in a box. If he wants to color water green and grass blue, then that is what he does and there is nothing we can do about it. Conformity is for the weak-minded. (I kid of course)
One of the reviews on LMG was "a bit risqué", oh dear, but later Simon casually informs us that "the snake can't go there" because it would be "too naughty regarding what it's touching". Excellent!
I did parity shading for my entire snake and just drew a line for clarity. That made it much easier to see that you'd run out of low digits in row 2 if the snake went all the way to the right edge of the grid.
Either it’s snowing in the UK in April, or Simon is on holiday/vacation. 🤔 Hope you’re having a great time, Simon, and thanks for keeping the daily Sudoku going!
Someone else figured out that it was recorded on January 8, based on the number of days the puzzle has been out (shown on the completion screen). He is on holiday at the moment.
I love snake puzzles and I love German whispers, the perfect combo for me. I really loved that once you know if one cell on the snake was high or low, you can know if a cell is high or low if it is on the snake anywhere else in the grid. Very cool. 🐍
30:25 for me. Quite enjoyable puzzle! From the discrepancy in the number of days the puzzle has been out, it looks like this video was recorded around the 8th of January. Hope you're having a lovely vacation, Simon!
I finished in 85 minutes. The logic of German Whispers on the Snake were very satisfying to figure out. I greatly enjoyed this one. Also, the picture looks kind of like a heart. It must be a repeating theme in these snake puzzles to have a picture that looks like a heart in the end. Great Puzzle!
That was fantastic 😍 - absolutely incredible that such a sparse grid can give a unique solution! A relatively straightforward solve once you know a few tricks like bishops colour, which took me about half an hour. One step that might have helped Simon would be to consider whether the square in r2c7 can see all 6+ of its snake cells vertically ... and by connectivity, it can't, because it would run into the left-hand end circle and leave no way of joining the snake cells in the top-left of the grid. This means that it must go right from that cell.
Am I the only one who ends up with a blue/orange striped snake? I feel like I have to follow the CtC standard colouring for high and low digits, or it just doesn't feel right.
I did, except I used pink for 456 because at first I thought you couldn't put a 4 or a 6 except at the ends. It did seem strange to see Simon using pencilmarks for high/low instead of colors!
I decided to try it, after the German Whispers rule, and I was able to do it!!! Super happy to do a snake puzzle. 🎉 Thanks to all the knowleged I learned in this channel! 🤗
Finished in 32:32. The logic of the snake was superb. And the squares helped make a lovely break-in and first 3/4 of the puzzle. With the sudoku and logic of the snake making up the last 1/4. Fun puzzle!
At 20:50 you were pondering if there was another way to see that, there was! The 9s in box 7 takes the 9 out of the 89 in box 1. That means inr1c1 is a 7 or 9, and a 9 is impossible because it forces a 6 in that column, with 1s on each side meaning the 12s in box 1 have to be both 2. It was extremely circuitous, and I'm glad you found the smart way vs the goofy way I did.
Solved it eventually, but got stymied by thinking the ends of the snake acted the same as squares. Doh! Great fun, despite my idiocy. I made my snake yellow to be different... Wonderful puzzle!
Wow, amazing! I wasn't quite sure how to solve that one, but it came together beautifully bit by bit. Glad I already knew about "checkerboarding" on whispers. Had a few stalls staring at the screen for a while, but the next step always came eventually. 32:19 solve time.
42:19. Systematically played very well until I got caught up on the snake piece crossing from box 6 to 9. I mistakenly assumed the 8 had to go to the 3 to the left of the box and kept trying to figure out ways it could continue to either circle. It at least caused me to fill in a lot of the standard sudoku to help find the error.
27:44 easier way to see: the 4 in R8C3 needs only one more cell, so snake either turns left into R7C2 or continues to R6C3. If it goes to R6C4 it has to connect to R5C2 and can't take another cell in C3
A great puzzle except for what I found a bit confusing. For a while I kept treating the circles like the squares in terms of the counting of the orthogonal snake digits.
A bit of a slip up at 20:40. He concludes that r1c1 must be a 7 because it is between a 1 and 2. That logic works the opposite way. It very well could be a 9 in r1c1 and a 7 in r3c1. It was pretty late in the puzzle when I finally reconciled r1c1 and r1c3. He was just lucky that he put them this way.
11:18 the way I see it, I pretend the grid is a checkerboard. Any orthogonally connected path between two cells must switch between black and white cells, therefore if start and finish are same color, then you must have step the same number of times in white and black cells -> total number of steps is even. Similar argument concludes that otherwise it's an odd number of steps
Is the way Simon determined the properties (high/low) digits on the squares and circles using bishop diagonals common knowledge? I've watched a fair bit of CtC (not much recently though) and never seen that logic used. I got stuck because i couldn't find that one, maybe I'm just stupid haha
102:08 for me. Got stuck for something like an hour and for some reason, I kept ignoring that lone 4 at the bottom square that I had gotten right at the start of the puzzle. Once I saw it, I solved the rest of the puzzle in under 10 minutes. Ah well. Really nice puzzle though!
Did it in 40:58. I made a few hasty and incorrect deductions/assumptions that forced me to undo quite a bit of progress, so I potentially could have had a quicker time if I stopped to think more carefully.
42:04, but I felt stuck for such a long time, I'm assuming I left the timer paused at some point. There were a few dumb moments where I was stuck for not using square clues and I spent too long thinking the line could loop around the corner of box 7, which would require five high digits in column 1.
I got to all squares are on the snake and the snake does not touch itself orthogonally and thought I can't even do that much ignoring everything else. I suppose it would have said instead cells if the whole grid was to be on a snake?
Is this an older puzzle you grabbed out of your 'I didn't have time to do a new video' box ? For I can't believe Sven would have taken your 'I loved this puzzle' button away at the end...
Simon please... 28:30 You should see that R7C3 needs to connect to snake somewhere. Likewise, R5C2 needs to connect to snake somewhere. If either of them don't connect directly to each other there's NO room for one of them to get out of there. So they HAVE to connect. There are three ways they can connect. All in column 2, all in column three and half/half through columns 2/3. Can it ever connect through R5C3? If it did, R8C3 would have to be 5 or greater, which it isn't. Therefore, R5C3 is NOT SNAKE (green) and now you know that R6C2 IS SNAKE.
18:03 Simon! Why no follow that logic to its conclusion?! I know the 4 is pretty, but look at all the numbers you are missing by that! ...it took 2 minutes for you to get back there.
The 6 example on the snake rules I found confusing , should it not be a 7 , being 4 down and 3 in total across (as the language in the rule is ambigious)?
That would double count the cell containing the square. There's nothing to suggest you count some of the cells seen twice. It sees six cells, including r2c6, counted once because it's one cell.
ahhh I was so close to solving this but halfway through I thought in my head the bottom right circle had to see 6+ squares, but the circles don't follow the square rules, and so I made a mistake :(
RU-vid, what are you doing? They display an ad banner that hides part of the grid for the whole runtime of the video. That's not bearable on a Sudoku solve video. Simon, Mark, this surely has nothing to do with you, it's youtube trying to make ads more effective and maybe rising prices for advertising, but you should ask RU-vid for an option to turn this off. You may not have this as ads are localized and I found a solutoin in toggling to picture-in-picture mode when the ad banner stays in the original window and the freely movable and sizable video window can be fully seen.
