Thanks so much for this feature. This puzzle was a response to a challenge about making loop/snake puzzles with a small number of clues by dorlir (who I'm sure some of you will know from his excellent puzzles). My aim wasn't to make it easy but rather to have surprisingly powerful clues and a wild loop path that emerges from a simple looking clue pattern. It's still mind boggling to me how well it was received. Thanks to everyone who recommended it!
"3x3 box borders divide the loop into segments. Circles are on the loop and their digits count the number of cells on their segments." (Both circles in box 8 have two segments inside the box border.) So the puzzle is broken if you add them up, as you have 3 fours in box 8 along the intended path.
@@AhsimNreiziev Yes, and the number of cells in the segments in box 8 is four for both circles in the 3x3 box unless you count them separately. It should read segment, not segments. 3 and 1 not 4. Unfortunately, it is written incorrectly.
@@dicebar_I don't think that kind of acting is in Simon's nature. Two reasons: that seems like a kind of deception that they just don't do on this channel, and he always seems to pick colors in the moment, even changing his mind when he picks something he doesn't like.
German whispers, conventionally denoted by green. So what does Simon do? Choose grey for the German Whispers loop and.... green for not on the loop. :)
Favorite part of this and EVERY solve is Simon's always present tunnel vision as his mind races ever closer to the solve. At @28:22 Simon has 68 pencil marked into r6c6, and proceeds to scan up and down the rows and columns for "SOMETHING ELSE" and his cursor lands on the 8 in r2c6 and just sits there, while he proceeds to ignore his cursor location. One minute later through loop logic he arrives at the answer. I wish we could get eye tracking for Simon's solves. Because it's just another peek inside his unapparelled racing mind.
Had that and the other thing was he could have green the original (black) numbers since they were all on the wrong polarity to be on the loop. That would have helped with the logic earlier.
I did just what you suggested and I tried the puzzle before watching even a single word of your video - and what a marvelous puzzle it is! I loved it! And then I watched your video just for the pleasure of watching you enjoy the puzzle. Thanks, Simon!
A "1" for difficulty on the basis of familiarity with Sudoku - there's a lot of info on German whispers that those unfamiliar with them would have to work out first.
Yeah, there's been some inflation of difficulty over the years. A 1 now, at times, could have been a 2 or even a 3 in the past. A 5 would have been laughed at for impossibility 😂
I do keep thinking that giving it a 1 for difficulty is underselling itself - I'm a relatively slow solver but I've watched quite a few puzzles involving German Whispers and am still currently an hour and a half into my personal solve and seemingly nowhere near finishing it. It might be relatively easy if familiar with the rule set but I would not necessarily call this approachable.
Having completed the puzzle and then watched the video, turns out I missed the very first deduction you were meant to make (I had got r1c1 down to 6 or 7 but completely forgot that you can haven't a 6 in the middle of a whisper line) and then managed to make most of the rest of the deductions that you have to completely out of order in much less obvious forms. It's amazing how much missing one early step of an intended solve can massively increase a solve time (good puzzle though)
Hello Simon, it’s Kasia, I really do appreciate the „Happy Birthday” from you! The videos are always my favourite moments of the day. I love math and logic puzzles and of course sudoku, so I’m even more happy that I managed to get my boyfriend to watch with me and we can now both say you are one of our favourite people! Thank you so much once again, you definitely made my 20th birthday wonderful :)
One of the rare puzzles where I wished Simon didn't do Sudoku. I loved how you could fill out the entire loop and all its numbers before touching anything outside the loop.
Worth mentioning: meggen033 consistently makes highly rated 1/2 star puzzles, and her fog of war puzzles in particular tend to have very, very subtle break-in logic. Highly recommended if you’re looking for easy but beautiful puzzles.
15:44 finish. A very fun puzzle with a nice break-in. After a few minutes I was second guessing the break-in, and double checked my logic. Fortunately it held up, and I continued on my way. Excellent job!
Rules: 06:23 Let's Get Cracking: 09:54 Simon's time: 28m16s Puzzle Solved: 38:10 What about this video's Top Tier Simarkisms?! Three In the Corner: 2x (37:15, 37:22) Knowledge Bomb: 1x (14:56) Maverick: 1x (10:50) And how about this video's Simarkisms?! Touch Itself: 6x (06:57, 07:17, 07:35, 10:33, 19:37, 27:38) By Sudoku: 6x (29:14, 30:08, 31:28, 32:30, 33:14, 33:50) Hang On: 6x (08:20, 16:56, 19:47, 26:21, 30:29, 37:54) Lovely: 5x (24:05, 24:33, 32:42, 38:05, 38:05) Beautiful: 4x (23:41, 23:43, 34:48, 38:55) In Fact: 4x (08:48, 26:18, 29:56, 34:13) Brilliant: 3x (04:24, 06:06, 38:32) Obviously: 3x (00:45, 18:31, 25:48) Ah: 3x (16:59, 22:07, 22:07) Sorry: 2x (06:20, 13:53) The Answer is: 2x (03:39, 13:23) Astonishing: 2x (01:01, 06:07) Deadly Pattern: 2x (37:37, 37:42) Approachable: 2x (03:22, 06:15) Cake!: 2x (04:28, 05:02) Clever: 1x (27:24) Naughty: 1x (09:33) Break the Puzzle: 1x (09:24) Fascinating: 1x (19:59) Gorgeous: 1x (38:00) Shouting: 1x (04:11) Whoopsie: 1x (12:22) Wow: 1x (16:08) Sudoku in a Sudoku Puzzle: 1x (31:34) Next Trick: 1x (29:22) What Does This Mean?: 1x (06:27) Nature: 1x (11:52) Pencil Mark/mark: 1x (12:29) Weird: 1x (16:39) Most popular number(>9), digit and colour this video: Ninety Nine (3 mentions) One (64 mentions) Green (7 mentions) Antithesis Battles: High (21) - Low (18) Even (7) - Odd (0) Lower (4) - Higher (2) Column (7) - Row (4) FAQ: Q1: You missed something! A1: That could very well be the case! Human speech can be hard to understand for computers like me! Point out the ones that I missed and maybe I'll learn! Q2: Can you do this for another channel? A2: I've been thinking about that and wrote some code to make that possible. Let me know which channel you think would be a good fit!
Finished it in 20:04. It was actually 15:04, but I made a hasty deduction / lucky assumption regarding the shape of the loop in Box 1, so I added a 5 minute penalty to my time. Great puzzle though. I enjoy these "alternating/oscillating" loop puzzles. To start I color the whole grid in a faint blue and red checkerboard pattern to help keep track of potential polarity of each cell, then solve from there.
Thank you for putting an approachable puzzle on the channel from time to time. Anything above two stars is too difficult for me, my patience runs out on those. This one was perfect, sth like 46 minutes for me. Great puzzle, very satysfying.
Loved this one and added another heart to the pile. Perfect after my gruelling multi-day journey with Manta Ray's puzzle from an earlier video, I slowly savored this sudoku in 00:55:27. The solve felt very smooth all the way through; every time you wondered where the line went next, you'd see a collection of helpful numbers arranged around the grid gently forcing it to do exactly one thing.
Really wonderful puzzle, definitely one of the best 1 star I've done from LMD! Completed in 11:43 (conflict checker off), many thanks to gdc for a great puzzle!
I have a much greater want to see Simon and Mark live than to go see Tailor Swift live. Sadly, I will have to settle for watching on RU-vid, because I am trapped here in the wilds of western Canada.
I found this very tricky. I got stuck several times. I did a 4* the other day and found it more approachable. Maybe I’m just not great at seeing German whisper logic properly.
A beautiful puzzle. I'm not a constructor, but @ gdc or anyone else: I was thinking could you maybe take two fiendishly difficult puzzles with the same solved grid but completely different rule set and just overlay them? Like, maybe some sort of lines Sudoku and some sort of domino Sudoku? Then you'd always have at least two active clues to get you to the next deduction. Would that make for a fun and somewhat easy puzzle?
36:07 with a look at the video after about 20 minutes of being stuck to be shown that the loop touching itself diagonally does not mean that it can do a 180 in a 2x2 region. D'oh!
I actually don't usually do these. I just watch Simon do them. But today I decided to take a stab since it was so highly praised as approachable. 1:53:53. Looks like I need more practice. Haha (It took me a while to realize that R1C8 could not be a 3 due to being beside a 7 because I was so busy looking at other places.)
If it helps, I'm currently an hour and a half into my solve of it. While I think you can call the puzzle "relatively easy if you're familiar with the ruleset", I would question calling it "approachable".
Rats. It seems I mistakenly reversed the 5/6 pair in box 1 early on, but it didn't come back to bite me until the very end. After an hour of work I ended up with an unresolvable conflict. After confirming that the loop placements were correct through the video, I cleared out all the others and re-sudokued them, finally getting it right. It wouldn't be proper to record it as a win, so no exact time.
With other words: moving on the chessboard orthogonal (as rook does) with every step you change the (bishop i.e. field) colour. On the orthogonal loop of German whispers type with every move you change the „polarity“ (high/low). This means that the digits belonging to the loop on the same field colour has the same polarity.
It's specifically because the rules say the german whispers are never moving diagonally. If one digit on the line is a 4 or lower, the next one on the line will always be 6 or higher. When you start with the line drawn, you can color every other space to remind you which ones are guaranteed to be low and which ones are guaranteed to be high. In other words, every other cell on the line would have the same color. Because we're not given the line, but have to draw the line on this puzzle, that extra hint about never going diagonally is critical. If you never go diagonally, you'll always have to draw the line through two cells to get to the cell which is diagonal from where you started and two more cells to get to the next one diagonally, and there's no way to draw a line which would ever get you from one cell to another cell in that diagonal sequence which would have gone through an odd number of cells. Combining these two things of always needing to draw the line through an even number of cells to move somewhere diagonal from where you started and of always having the same color on every other cell of the german whispers, everything on the diagonal would have to be the same color to be allowed on the line.
Imagine the sudoku grid being colored like a checkerboard. Now no matter on which field you start, if you move 2 steps in any direction, you will still end up on the same color as you started. The same thing happens here - we know that high and low (ie black and white) digits always alternate. So if you are on a high digit and you move 2 steps on the loop, you are again on a high digit. So by determining that R1C1 is a "high" digit, we can draw our imaginary checkerboard and know the parity for every digit that is on the loop.
I chatted with an experienced birdwatcher once, and he indicated he literally no longer sees little brown birds when scanning, because they’re (almost?) never interesting.
that's the meta though. since youre allowed to dislike a puzzle for being too easy but not for being too hard, you just make it as hard as possible/ drastically underrate the difficulty and then the approval rating increases. Hence why this community is so gatekept from people who have more than one hobby. Imagine if chess grandmasters were the only ones approving and rating all the tactics puzzles. How popular do you think those puzzles would be?
since ppl love to misinterpret things they disagree with, i need to point out that none of this is on CtC. Their focus is to solve the hardest puzzles possible and they're great at it. The problem is with setters and LMG lying about the difficulty.
LMD displays 1-star for anything with an average of 1.0 to 1.8 average difficulty. That, combined with the fact that most people rating puzzles on LMD do a lot of puzzles, combined with survivorship bias, means that "1-star" covers a *very* wide range of difficulties. LMD is just not well designed in this respect.
