What's amazing about this video is it's 80 minutes without any terribly long stretches of impasse. Usually the longer solves have a big "what do I even do to begin/progress" section (like the brain-melting equation on Friday), but this video is an hour and a third of continuous gradual progress. I feel like it says something about the brilliance of this puzzle that it's able to hold up to such a consistent application of logic while not cracking open until the bitter end...
Couldn't have said it better. No monumentally hard break-in, but nor is it a smooth sail to the end. Every single step us hard but not too hard. (well, too hard for me, but not for Simon :P)
Yeah, for a highly challenging puzzle I think it was more approachable than most, but that didn't stop me from hitting what seemed to be brick walls several times. I also broke the puzzle twice. All in all it took me several sessions and I didn't finish it until yesterday afternoon. But I love how it "self-assembles", I love the consistent difficulty level, I love the novel logic, and I love how -- for an overtly "mathy" puzzle, it doesn't actually require you to perform massive feats of mental arithmetic and memory. I resorted to a calculator once, close to the end, when I suspected that what turned out to be the second 45 cage might actually be forced to be a 45 cage, and added stuff up to confirm. But that was the only time in the entire puzzle that I needed to use that kind of brute force max/min on more than a cage or two at a time. For me, that's refreshing and a relief. Compare to the little killer/killer puzzle that just came out with all the T's -- I got as far as realizing the "1 degree of freedom" restriction in that one, contemplated the kind of solving process that would be required from that point, and just closed the puzzle. I had no further interest in continuing and watching the video was just as glad that I hadn't. Not my thing. But this puzzle is.
This is one of the ones where I work alongside Simon and pause the vid to fill in when I spot something he temporarily misses. It helps me feel a little smart anyway. Ofc, I wouldn't have a chance at solving it without Simon's help.
With almost all videos I fall into the pattern of "oh this looks fascinating, let's try to solve it!", trying, failing somewhere along the line, and then bitterly moving on. For once I opened the app, looked at it for 5 minutes, and actually committed to just watching the solution, haha, great stuff.
Maybe if he solves a sudoku hunt of about the length of the OOT one Mark solved on the channel a few months ago but with puzzles closer to the standard sort of difficulty of the channel?
I'm pretty damn sure I don't understand the rules. Even with the example, I think it's much worse. I will have to watch for 10 minutes to see how these "rules" get applied.
I did this on my own and it took me two afternoons. There is a gorgeous bit of logic that Simon missed that helped me greatly. On the part of the solve around 58:00 onwards (maybe even earlier), you can add every maximum value in the grid (taking into consideration the red region in box 7 and the blue region in box 3 which add to 17 and 33 respectively), and the total ends up being precisely 405 (45 x 9). This immediately tells you that every other region must be completely maxed out, which in particular means that the red region in box 8 must have nine digits in it, and this tells you the shape of it. This kind of logic felt very much like something Phistomefel would do.
1) I agree 2) genuinely curious, do UA-cam video lengths show up in minutes for you, or did you convert? Mine shows in hour:minute, I don't know if that's just a US thing or what
At 32:50 Why can't the 1 clue (R2C6) connect to the 11 clue (R3C5) to form a cage? Edit: Another comment asked the same question, here's the answer: Since there is a 6 in R2C6 the created cage would have a maximum of 10, Therfore R3C5 and R3C6 would have to contain 1 and 3. This creates a 1 3 pair in box 1 in R2C3 and R1C3. Now where do you put the second 1 or 3 in the green cage? (Which must contain digits 1-4). You can't put it in Box 2 or Box 1 now as both 3 by 3 boxes already contain 1,3 pairs.
More simply, R2C6 connecting to the 11 clue would cause 1, 2, 3, and 4 to appear in five cells in row 3. The total for the created cage could also be 9, using 1 and 2, but again, we run into the problem of 1, 2, 3, and 4 appearing in five cells.
"You're jocking my straps!" Well there's an expression I've never heard before! Brilliant puzzle, it took me over 3 hours to solve but I did it without referring to this video. Somewhat of an achievement for me.
Looking back to older CtC videos like this, it is actually quite surprising here to notice that Simon places a 3 in the corner of the grid at 1:14:39, without any singing at all ;-)
Nice. I got it at 37:27 - ("one of those squares"... there's only one 2 in among "these squares", though! :D Then again, I don't see/remember why it's not in R2C3, so... maybe I've got it wrong? 37:34 implies I might... ok, 39:12 nails it down.) If I was hiring, I'd invite you for an interview, at least. ;)
P.S. For me, it was the 5 in R9C6 that I was "yelling" (not literally) about for ages, before he finally settled on it at 1:14:26. (And 1:02:10/1:02:12/1:02:24 was just... painful. Especially after 1:01:32. ;) Not to mention not extending that 46 out to its full capacity sooner...) But then, you watched this 9 months ago, so this is all probably quite irrelevant to you now. :D Ah well. I'm amused. :)
Before watching this channel I would have stared at this with absolutely no idea where to start. It took me a few hours, and I struggled, nearly having a heart attack at the end with all the deadly patterns, but I managed to solve it on my own.
Since that square is a six, the maximum of the 2 red squares are 4 which means we would have to use 1 and 3, the 1 and 3 in column 3 has ro be in box 1, therefore both 1 and 3 of the green 5-cell region cant be in box 1 and one of the 1 and 3 has to be in box 2, so the 2 red squares cant be 1 and 3. Dont know if Simon skipped the possibility of it but he would have found this logic anyways
A simple explanation is that the red cells have a maximum of 4, which would be either a 1-2 or 1-3 pair. Either way, with the 1234 in box 3, you would have to put 4 numbers from 1234 into five cells in row 3, which would be impossible
This is my question, and I'm not sure I'm following you're responses. @Fanta, which is the 5th cell requiring 1234? From what I can see r1c4 and c6 can be anything up to 5, although that does still leave you with the same problem just for 5 digits across 6 cells. @True, I can see that making the 2 red cell a 1,3 pair also makes a 1,3 pair in column 3, which means that whatever you place in row 1 has no place anywhere in row 2. That's fine, but what stops the red cells from being a 1,2 pair instead? The same exclusions don't seem to apply. Honestly, it looks like the 8 pencil mark may have thrown him off just for a second. Either way, the logic in the orange section in box 3 disambiguates it all like 2 minutes later, it just seems like that first step was too deep to not be mentioned.
@@Sh3phrd @fanta's explanation is good : if the 6 in r2c6 joins the red region in r3, r3cs5&6 have to be a 1-2 or 1-3 pair because the total has to be 10 or less and you're adding a 6 to it. This 1-2 or 1-3 pair clashes with r3c7,8&9, as you'd end up with a 1,2,3,4 constraint on 5 cells in r3 !
I think Simon actually missed this possibility and got a bit lucky here, but I'm sure he would have gotten the logic anyways had he considered it. The explanation by fantafanta works best.
Somewhere around 58:00 there's a nice trick to resolve how some of the cages grow. Puzzle spoiler warning! At this point, the only cages that have not yet been completed (which I will refer to by the largest clue they contain) are the 39, 22, 18, 13, 16, and 46 cages in the bottom right of the puzzle. We know that boxes 6 and 9 have a combined sum of 90. If you tried to fill these boxes without using the 46 cage, the best you could do would be 38 - 16 + 21 + 17 + 12 + 3 = 75. This is not enough, so the 46 cage must seep into box 9, cutting off the 16 cage from growing larger. You could also conclude that at least the remaining white cells in box 9 must be part of the 46 cage.
Great puzzle as always. For the next puzzles, maybe you can place the clues in the bottom right portion of each cell since you rarely use 4 corner notations anyway and thus lessen the chances of covering any clues.
I stepped away for a second and when I came back thought the screen was frozen, actually Simon was just perfectly still not moving at all and looking perplexed.
i noticed something at the start of the puzzle which lead me to have a much different ending, starting at about 37:10. that being, if you sum the 19 (half) biggest clues in the puzzle, you get 448. the cage totals are at most 1 less than their upper bound clue, so all cages sum to at most 448-19=429. only 24 away from 405, the sum of every cell in any sudoku. not quite usable, but stuck with me until i finished the 46 clue in the top right which only summed to 33 taking away half the degrees of freedom, on top of others here and there. here's my solve from 37 mins in: first notice the 17 can only reach either of the 46 clues without breaking the cage, so is a lower bound attached to one of the 46s summing up the maximums again knowing everything we know so far, we get 413 (tentatively using 16,18,21,22,39 as upper bounds). only 8 away from 405 this tells us that we cant replace any of the 5 tentative upper bounds with anything that is more than 8 away. the 1 and 5 clues in the bottom right are therefore definite lower bounds and cant be paired with each other. this forces the 1 and 13 cages together, taking away 3 degrees of freedom the 17 cage is paired with a 46, we don't know which, but the logic works either one. the cage needs to sum to at least 40, and thus is a 7+ cell cage. this forces the 17 to expand around the 16, forcing the 16 to pair with the 14 as well as forcing the 5 with the 18. this removes our last degrees of freedom since out upper bounds are now 13,16,18,22,39: 8 less than before. This means that all remaining cages need to be maximal (in particular, the 17-46 is a 9 cell cage). this lets us fill in most of the remaining cages and really simplifies the end.
Another monster of a puzzle. I loved it. I managed to solve it, without any hints, in around 2 and a half hours. Not quick, but still happy. I spotted a couple of pieces of logic that eluded Simon. Firstly, and I've already seen some other comments mention this, Simon spots that r3c1 is mirrored to r6c3. But it's also mirrored to r9c2. This eliminates 5 from r9c2, and forces a 5,7 pair into box 1 which are fairly quickly resolved. Secondly, from the point Simon reached around the one hour mark (1:00:00), I summed up all the maximums for all the cages occupying boxes 6, 8 and 9. I adjusted for known cells outside of theses cages/boxes, and found they gave a total of exactly 135 for the three boxes (= 45 x 3). So I could deduce all the cages had to in fact sum to their maximum values. This included the 46 cage starting in the left column of box 8, so this had to be 9 cells large. This made completing the puzzle a lot easier than Simon's method.
I used that logic as well for r9c2. Really big help. But I took twice as long as you did for my solve. It didn't help that I had entered two digit backwards in the bottom left. So I had to restart mid way through as I couldn't spot the mistake right away. I used cage sums throughout the puzzle. Not just to see if they used the maximum, but also to see if a cage could connect within a box or not. If two numbers connect within a box, it lowers the sum for that box. If it connects with something outside the box, you can get higher totals. In many places, I saw that if the cages were completely within a box, the total for that box was under 45 (or under 90, etc. for multiple boxes). I don't think Simon used it once. I was also surprised that near the end, I solved it faster than Simon. Simon got stuck for a long time with that 15 cage at the bottom.
@@alienrenders I made a mistake during my solve too, that almost had me despairing that I would have to restart, and I wasn't sure I was prepared to, knowing how long it had taken me so far. Luckily, I found my mistake: I'd somehow ruled out the possibility of the original 9 cell cage turning right to reach one of the 46s, and had turned it left instead. I think 'debugging' my mistake was the hardest step I had to take. I'd had the idea box totals was going to help with the initial break-in, but didn't seem to get anywhere with it. So I kind of forgot about it until that one point towards the end. Well done if you used it throughout.
I know I'm late to the game, but still. 8:05 Can't the pink box be(Starting from the 9) 1,3,1,4,5? There is no rule against same digit reappearing in the same region. It would validate us to use the number 2 in the region below.
44:37 This was a treat. Lovely logical flow and the last minute reveal to complete it with the answers I knew had to be true for uniqueness but we're stubbornly holding out to the end for logical resolution.
UI suggestion to resolve the issue with the corner pencil markings -- have the numbers/letters in the area/killer cage clues occupy that corner in the corner marking (but annotate it as being "fixed"). That way, the corner pencil marking should avoid that spot and go to the next available one.
Wouldn't it be easier to not use top left as part of a corner marking? Or perhaps start corner markings from bottom up, so only the 4th corner marking will take top left (It's not often to require that many in a cell).
Oh right I forgot I mentioned in prior videos but these killer cage style clues could also be top-middle, where it interferes with no corners at all. A low cage total could actually be a little bit confusing if it counted as a corner marking and moved the next ones.
@@AldrichLukes In the case of killer sudoku cages and area notations, that is what I'm describing. If the cell does not have a puzzle notation, that corner will be available for corner markings.
Oddly enough, unlike Cracking the Cryptic: the movie, where I was just dumbfounded how Simon even thought of some of the steps forward, I could actually understand all of the logic all the way through. What a stroke of genius to make such a difficult puzzle all the way through, but make it so that when you watch someone else solve it, it all makes sense. Btw, I'm not putting down Ahaupt's puzzle at all, that one started with an absolutely blisteringly hard break-in, while this one was more consistently hard up throughout
I found a bit of logic you can use throughout the puzzle that makes the second half a lot easier if you're keeping track of it. There are 38 clues, so there will be 19 areas. If you sum the 19 highest clues (subtracting 1 from each for the strict inequality) you get 429. This means there are only 24 degrees of freedom (429-405 because all the digits in a completed Sudoku grid sum to 405) from a perfect configuration of joining the highest half of clues with the lowest half of clues, and filling the areas with their maximum totals. This might seem like a lot, but consider that you not only lose degrees of freedom every time an area falls short of its maximum, but also when you connect two clues from the lower half or two clues from the higher half. The two 15 clues are median clues (18th and 19th if you put them in ascending order), so the degrees lost when pairing two low clues (below 15) is the difference between the higher clue and 15, and the degrees lost when pairing two high clues (above 15) is the difference between the lower clue and 15. For example, joining the red 15/19 clue doesn't lose any degrees, but only filling them with 17 loses 1. Joining the purple 1/13 clues loses 2 degrees right then, and would lose more if it was filled with less than 12 total. The biggest culprit is the blue 1/46 clue that is only filled with 33, that's 12 degrees lost, half the total we have. It takes a little while for this to really matter, but there are some deductions you can make a lot earlier, like how far the red 17 (eventually 17/46) has to extend, which in turn cuts off the blue 16, forcing it into the 14. You can keep track of some as you fill it in, but you have to do some forward thinking to find where the rest of them will go. By around the 50 minute mark of Simon's solve they're all gone (or at least you know where they will go). The rest of the puzzle is a lot easier when you realise that only certain clues can be paired up and they must all have maximum totals. Did anyone else find this, or something similar? I'm surprised Simon didn't considering he loves adding all the numbers up and thinking about degrees of freedom. He made a pretty good start without it so I guess he never had to stop and think about.
I did something similar, and I've seen a few other comments below mention it. I waited until nearing the end, and only used if for the last three boxes (6, 8 and 9), knowing they summed to 45 x 3 = 135. It certainly makes completing the red 17/46 cage a lot easier, when you know it has to be nine cells.
The "deadly patterns" actually reveal that the cells need to be within different regions in order to resolve since they are only deadly if they share the same clues.
I think Simon has a personal rule of not using uniqueness for logical deductions. The puzzle should be able to have a unique solution without having to pre-suppose it
Really a beautiful puzzle. Your ability to find the hidden logic at the starts of these puzzles astounds me. I've really been liking your channel recently! For some reason, UA-cam is only suggesting Simon's videos to me, I'll have to try one of Mark's sometime soon.
Thanks for the video! I tried the puzzle myself (after taking a couple days to solve the smaller example 1-6 sudoku for practice) but quickly got stuck. Then had some good fun taking turns with Simon being stuck, feeling terribly smug when I was ahead, until I needed to watch him solve past me then pause the video again. It meant I could actually solve much of it myself, though all in all it was too hard. Cheers!
Numbers do not make sense to my brain at all, but something about watching these videos is so relaxing. And watching this mans brain work, is amazing and boggling. How I ended up watching sudoku videos I have no idea but wow I love them.
Man this puzzle took me like 3 hours to complete... I LOVE these really tough puzzles... so satisfying to finish them. More tough puzzles like this please!
I feel that an appropriate secondary name for this video would be "Cracking the Cryptic: Cracking Simon" LOL! There was a point in the video I thought the puzzle broke Simon. I love watching the videos!
What I really like about this puzzle is that the special instructions stay relevant until the end. Often you can finish a puzzle with normal sudoku once you've used the special instructions to break in and you've solved all the arrows/cages/dots, etc. In this puzzle you are still working back and forth between coloring and normal sudoku right down to the final doubles.
Astounding! I had no idea where to go at all but all of Simon's explanations made perfect sense when I heard them! Now if only I could figure it out on my own...
The only bit of logic im proud of myself seeing was at the very end I saw the logic to resolve the deadly patterns. 1:17:20 Deadly pattern of 1/3 in columns 2/8, rows 4/6. The pair in column 2 is purple, if the pair in column 8 were both the same color (also purple) then its unresolvable, the only way to resolve the deadly pattern is if r6c8 were red and resolved by the fact that red already has a 3. This is the only possibility of a puzzle resolution So for the 8/9 in column 2/9, row 7/8 we can apply the same logic, that blue region must extend somewhere and pick up another 8 or ni... craap no room... okay new plan... the only other possibility to resolve this is by cage maximum, column 9 row 7 MUST be an 8, and blue MUST add to its maximum value or else this deadly pattern will be unresolvable The rest of the puzzle? Completely lost, but that one a saw
For puzzles like these, it would be amazing if you had support in the software to draw borders. There are a lot of puzzles that would benefit from this, I think
I was hoping this would end up here, it looked fun but I didn't quite get through it. In general, I really appreciate how this channel makes it possible to learn how to solve puzzles of that difficulty. Otherwise, it is hard to get any sort of "clues" what to look out for.
@@leporid257 I am not sure if I understood correctly, so please forgive me if not. For me Simon is quick while Mark is going to hyperspeed instantly :)
@@lukaszpiotrluczak awww okay, then watch Simon for another while it helps when you play Mark on 0.75x to spot what he sees, or just pause and see. it gets better with time!
"You must be jocking my straps" - Well, that's certainly a phrase. But seriously, a great solve video for a puzzle that I could barely get going with. Really enjoyable watch.
I've always been absolutely terrible at puzzles of all kinds but there's just something delightful about seeing someone so intelligent have so much fun with a puzzle this complicated.
I was fully expecting smoke to come out of Simons' ears and an overheat warning light to start flashing. I think he'll need to lie down after this one.
Dear Simon, I love your solves. Even though I would never be able to solve such a puzzle myself, you explain so well, that even I can follow you. I was a bit confused at 32:40 when you said the 1 in r1c9 can't connect to the 49 in r3c7 because it would isolate the 1 in r2c6. I thought why can't it connect to the 11 in r3c5? It took me a while to notice that r3c5 and r3c6 would then have to be 4 or less and this would make 5 cells in row 3 which have to be 4 or less which is impossible. I guess you had unconciously noticed this immediately. All in all I just want to say youre AMAZING.
I needed to pause cause this confused me for a second too. If you try to connect that 6 to the 11 clue, you'd need to make the other two cells sum to less than 4, meaning 1 and 2 or 1 and 3. There's three squares to the right that need to be 1/2/3/4 in row 3, and that would make 5 squares that would need to be the numbers 1/2/3/4.
Haha! I managed this one! 1:36:31 for my solve, and I have to agree, this was monumentally hard. I think you made a massive meal of the ending though by not cleaning up your pencil marks and by not changing the bottom right region's color earlier on. When you were stuck endlessly on the final configuration of the grid, if you had put in candidates for the bottom left box, you would have seen that the 5-18 cage was almost entirely forced immediately. r7c8 was very limited in its lower bound, and combined with the column 9 logic of "1 degree of freedom" meant that you could restrict the box 9 values heavily to provide a solution. I still loved watching the solve, and you got through the opening much, MUCH faster than I did.
Boxes 6 and 9 shook out very quickly for me when I noticed that the max values of the areas covering them were all quite low, and that the red area in box 8, with it's upper bound of 46, had the potential to pick up quite a bit of slack in boxes 6 and 9. The remaining areas (21-39, 14-22, 5-18 and 1-13) could only reach a combined maximum of 88, which it turned out was only possible if the red area extended all the way to r6c8. And that left zero degrees of freedom so I could also conclude that remaining areas were all maximal. Not sure if that was Phistomefel's intended solve path but if it was, then the puzzle is even more elegant and genius!
apologies if he gets this later, but commenting as I watch - the key part missed early was that the two mirror cells (he mentions) in r3c1 and r6c3 must ALSO be mirrored in r9c2. This keeps the 5 in box 7 to column 3 and so puts a 5 in r1c3. This was available from about 24mins in and makes a lot of the box 1 solve and the long 45 cage solvable much earlier.
I feel so bad everytime Simon feels the need to apologize 😭❤ everyone knows it's easier to spot things when your watching someone else solve these.. we love u Simon, no need to apologize ❤
This was a work of art. I could tell right away that it was much too difficult for me, but watching the video made me wish so hard that it would have been able to do it. It looked like a blast to work out. And watching the solve was pure joy.
After an hour of getting only a few cages I broke down and gave up. Having watched this now I am glad I did. I perfectly comfortable with the fact that I couldn't do it this time.
Some logic that says it can’t (tho I don’t remember Simon mentioning it and was also like “why are you assuming this!”) is that R3C7 8 & 9 have to be from 1234 and so at best only one of R3C5 and R3R6 can be 1 (making the other 3 cells in Row 3 Box 3 2 3 and 4) and the other must therefore be at least 5, meaning that if the 1 connects to 11 we have 6 + 1 + 5 = 12 at a minimum, breaking it
I don’t think he saw it, but the triple 1234 to the right of the red cage disambiguates it. The two red cells containing the 11 add up to at least 6 (1+5), so it can’t be a 1/11 cage because it would add up to at least 12.
The way I resolved it was to see that both 8 and 9 had to go into row 3 in box 2. So at least one of the red squares contains either an 8 or 9. That couldn't go with a 6 in a cage with an upper limit of 11. Not sure Simon didn't just get a little bit lucky though.
Took me about 2 hours in total! Really fun puzzle, and actually quite approachable. One of the few 5/5 star puzzles from LMG that I've been able to do.
Saw that it was a Phistomefel puzzle and almost declined to try it. There was a lot of staring at it, but in the end 2:08:10 Holy hell was that puzzle tough, and I had pretty close to the same bit of relief and joy as Simon on realizing the final breaking of the last deadly pattern.
Simon's deduction at 32:45 seems like a lucky error. The 1 could belong to the unpaired 11 at this point in the puzzle based on his markings, and perhaps I missed Simon providing a justification for why it can't be. Rather, it seems he treats the unpaired 11's area as if it must be exclusive of the 1. The actual justification requires knowing the that the bottom 3 cells in the top-middle box must contain both an 8 and 9, but he doesn't mark the 9's presence there until 39:08. After we know about the 9's presence, we can conclude that the 11's area must contain at least one of the 8 or 9. Since joining the 1 to the 11's area would add a 6, the resulting sum would be 14 at a minimum, which is not allowed. Hence the 1 cannot be paired with the 11.
Simon: *finally gets a digit after loads of work* "Now that must help somewhere"
Puzzle: "You get NOTHING! Good day sir!"
Find someone who looks at you the way Simon looks at a phistomfel puzzle.
What's amazing about this video is it's 80 minutes without any terribly long stretches of impasse. Usually the longer solves have a big "what do I even do to begin/progress" section (like the brain-melting equation on Friday), but this video is an hour and a third of continuous gradual progress. I feel like it says something about the brilliance of this puzzle that it's able to hold up to such a consistent application of logic while not cracking open until the bitter end...
Couldn't have said it better. No monumentally hard break-in, but nor is it a smooth sail to the end. Every single step us hard but not too hard. (well, too hard for me, but not for Simon :P)
Yeah, for a highly challenging puzzle I think it was more approachable than most, but that didn't stop me from hitting what seemed to be brick walls several times. I also broke the puzzle twice. All in all it took me several sessions and I didn't finish it until yesterday afternoon. But I love how it "self-assembles", I love the consistent difficulty level, I love the novel logic, and I love how -- for an overtly "mathy" puzzle, it doesn't actually require you to perform massive feats of mental arithmetic and memory. I resorted to a calculator once, close to the end, when I suspected that what turned out to be the second 45 cage might actually be forced to be a 45 cage, and added stuff up to confirm. But that was the only time in the entire puzzle that I needed to use that kind of brute force max/min on more than a cage or two at a time. For me, that's refreshing and a relief.
Compare to the little killer/killer puzzle that just came out with all the T's -- I got as far as realizing the "1 degree of freedom" restriction in that one, contemplated the kind of solving process that would be required from that point, and just closed the puzzle. I had no further interest in continuing and watching the video was just as glad that I hadn't. Not my thing. But this puzzle is.
Yeah, phenomenal setting by one of the world's best to make the puzzle continue to challenge the whole way through
"You're jocking my straps" - new favorite complaint statement.
Is that a British thing?
@@randybartlett3042 "That British thing" has a name and you just hurt his feelings. Please apologize to Simon.
@@randybartlett3042 I've never heard it used before but possibly
@@randybartlett3042 Nope. I've lived here for half a century and never heard it before. It's just a Simonism.
I'm British and this one is new to me.
Simon: Do have a go at the puzzle.
Me: ( _Nerverously stares at the video length_ ) Nah man, I am good.
This is one of the ones where I work alongside Simon and pause the vid to fill in when I spot something he temporarily misses. It helps me feel a little smart anyway. Ofc, I wouldn't have a chance at solving it without Simon's help.
With almost all videos I fall into the pattern of "oh this looks fascinating, let's try to solve it!", trying, failing somewhere along the line, and then bitterly moving on.
For once I opened the app, looked at it for 5 minutes, and actually committed to just watching the solution, haha, great stuff.
Yeah I filled some colors in for half an hour and still don't know how to find actual numbers 🙀
He is secretly preparing us for a 4 hour puzzle or a puzzle marathon.
yummy! Let the games begin!
If he solves one of the PhD level puzzles I sent him from LMG we might actually get a 4 hour puzzle
Oh yeah, a 4h solve would be outstanding! I'd definitely love watching that one!
Maybe if he solves a sudoku hunt of about the length of the OOT one Mark solved on the channel a few months ago but with puzzles closer to the standard sort of difficulty of the channel?
arent marathons around 2 hours?
Simon: "I 'think' I understand the rules. Do have a go yourself."
Me: Um.
I think I'll watch a half hour first, then give it a go
I'm pretty damn sure I don't understand the rules. Even with the example, I think it's much worse. I will have to watch for 10 minutes to see how these "rules" get applied.
I took slightly longer than Simon. Six days.
You still win. The video is almost eight...(-ty minutes)
This should probably be titled “Cracking the Cryptic: the sequel”.
Phistomefel strikes back
revenge of Phistomefel
Electric Phistomefel Boogaloo
Finally, they are human after all 🤫.
Cracking The Cryptic: the cryptic cracking
I did this on my own and it took me two afternoons. There is a gorgeous bit of logic that Simon missed that helped me greatly. On the part of the solve around 58:00 onwards (maybe even earlier), you can add every maximum value in the grid (taking into consideration the red region in box 7 and the blue region in box 3 which add to 17 and 33 respectively), and the total ends up being precisely 405 (45 x 9). This immediately tells you that every other region must be completely maxed out, which in particular means that the red region in box 8 must have nine digits in it, and this tells you the shape of it. This kind of logic felt very much like something Phistomefel would do.
That moment when you see the new CtC video is 80 minutes long. Life is good
Between this and Cracking the Cryptic: The Movie, life's been really good recently haha
hell yeah! Two long videos in the last 3 days is nothing but spoiling for me xD .... If only we would have such long videos every day....
I agree, but it means I will never even break into the puzzle...
1) I agree
2) genuinely curious, do UA-cam video lengths show up in minutes for you, or did you convert? Mine shows in hour:minute, I don't know if that's just a US thing or what
@@corygunter5575 here in Romania also shows up in hh:mm:ss. I'm willing to bet that he made the conversion on his / her own
Simon: "Do have a go"
*checks video length*
*checks puzzle constructor*
Me: "fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice..."
It's "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me."
Fiddle de de
Me: Dang I'm having way easier of a time than Simon!
Also me: *lets Simon do all the hard parts for me*
“That must be an enormous region of a size about a hundred” 😂
At 32:50 Why can't the 1 clue (R2C6) connect to the 11 clue (R3C5) to form a cage?
Edit: Another comment asked the same question, here's the answer:
Since there is a 6 in R2C6 the created cage would have a maximum of 10, Therfore R3C5 and R3C6 would have to contain 1 and 3.
This creates a 1 3 pair in box 1 in R2C3 and R1C3. Now where do you put the second 1 or 3 in the green cage? (Which must contain digits 1-4). You can't put it in Box 2 or Box 1 now as both 3 by 3 boxes already contain 1,3 pairs.
Yes, _as it turns out_ the 1 can't connect to the 11, but I don't think he has actually proven it by this point.
More simply, R2C6 connecting to the 11 clue would cause 1, 2, 3, and 4 to appear in five cells in row 3. The total for the created cage could also be 9, using 1 and 2, but again, we run into the problem of 1, 2, 3, and 4 appearing in five cells.
@@TheDrako170 well that's a bobbins from me
So it works out, but he did get lucky.
"You're jocking my straps!" Well there's an expression I've never heard before! Brilliant puzzle, it took me over 3 hours to solve but I did it without referring to this video. Somewhat of an achievement for me.
Phistomefel needs to stop jocking Simon’s straps
Looking back to older CtC videos like this, it is actually quite surprising here to notice that Simon places a 3 in the corner of the grid at 1:14:39, without any singing at all ;-)
I’m trying to find to original of three in the corner by watching a bunch of his older videos lol
There are times when “bobbins!” just isn’t strong enough.
Is there a stronger word than "bobbins"?
@@Trias805 "Nobbins?"
@@goldenknight578 cow dung?
Personally, I've always been a fan of "smeg."
@@goldenknight578 nice
Proud of myself for spotting the 2 in box four before Simon, putting that on my resume
Nice. I got it at 37:27 - ("one of those squares"... there's only one 2 in among "these squares", though! :D Then again, I don't see/remember why it's not in R2C3, so... maybe I've got it wrong? 37:34 implies I might... ok, 39:12 nails it down.)
If I was hiring, I'd invite you for an interview, at least. ;)
P.S. For me, it was the 5 in R9C6 that I was "yelling" (not literally) about for ages, before he finally settled on it at 1:14:26.
(And 1:02:10/1:02:12/1:02:24 was just... painful. Especially after 1:01:32. ;) Not to mention not extending that 46 out to its full capacity sooner...)
But then, you watched this 9 months ago, so this is all probably quite irrelevant to you now. :D Ah well. I'm amused. :)
Before watching this channel I would have stared at this with absolutely no idea where to start. It took me a few hours, and I struggled, nearly having a heart attack at the end with all the deadly patterns, but I managed to solve it on my own.
1:01:01 roflmao. "You're jocking my straps."
Should defo put that on a tee shirt
I'd buy one
😂 😂 What does it mean, Simon??
Aha. I figured it out. Simon doesn't solve the puzzles, it's lettuce. He commands, "Lettuce, get cracking."
LOL.
It´s a real treat whenever Simon takes on one of these hard puzzles. I love the long videos and the drama.
At the end once everything finally came together, I really thought Simon was gonna cry
So when is the third in the trilogy? -- Cracking the Cryptic: Return of the Knight's Move?
32:46 why can't that 1 in r2c6 connect to red area below it?
Since that square is a six, the maximum of the 2 red squares are 4 which means we would have to use 1 and 3, the 1 and 3 in column 3 has ro be in box 1, therefore both 1 and 3 of the green 5-cell region cant be in box 1 and one of the 1 and 3 has to be in box 2, so the 2 red squares cant be 1 and 3. Dont know if Simon skipped the possibility of it but he would have found this logic anyways
A simple explanation is that the red cells have a maximum of 4, which would be either a 1-2 or 1-3 pair. Either way, with the 1234 in box 3, you would have to put 4 numbers from 1234 into five cells in row 3, which would be impossible
This is my question, and I'm not sure I'm following you're responses.
@Fanta, which is the 5th cell requiring 1234? From what I can see r1c4 and c6 can be anything up to 5, although that does still leave you with the same problem just for 5 digits across 6 cells.
@True, I can see that making the 2 red cell a 1,3 pair also makes a 1,3 pair in column 3, which means that whatever you place in row 1 has no place anywhere in row 2. That's fine, but what stops the red cells from being a 1,2 pair instead? The same exclusions don't seem to apply.
Honestly, it looks like the 8 pencil mark may have thrown him off just for a second. Either way, the logic in the orange section in box 3 disambiguates it all like 2 minutes later, it just seems like that first step was too deep to not be mentioned.
@@Sh3phrd @fanta's explanation is good : if the 6 in r2c6 joins the red region in r3, r3cs5&6 have to be a 1-2 or 1-3 pair because the total has to be 10 or less and you're adding a 6 to it.
This 1-2 or 1-3 pair clashes with r3c7,8&9, as you'd end up with a 1,2,3,4 constraint on 5 cells in r3 !
I think Simon actually missed this possibility and got a bit lucky here, but I'm sure he would have gotten the logic anyways had he considered it. The explanation by fantafanta works best.
Somewhere around 58:00 there's a nice trick to resolve how some of the cages grow. Puzzle spoiler warning!
At this point, the only cages that have not yet been completed (which I will refer to by the largest clue they contain) are the 39, 22, 18, 13, 16, and 46 cages in the bottom right of the puzzle. We know that boxes 6 and 9 have a combined sum of 90. If you tried to fill these boxes without using the 46 cage, the best you could do would be 38 - 16 + 21 + 17 + 12 + 3 = 75. This is not enough, so the 46 cage must seep into box 9, cutting off the 16 cage from growing larger. You could also conclude that at least the remaining white cells in box 9 must be part of the 46 cage.
Great puzzle as always. For the next puzzles, maybe you can place the clues in the bottom right portion of each cell since you rarely use 4 corner notations anyway and thus lessen the chances of covering any clues.
I stepped away for a second and when I came back thought the screen was frozen, actually Simon was just perfectly still not moving at all and looking perplexed.
This channel continues to blow my mind!! What an excellent puzzle and solve. Love this channel more and more each day!
The moment where Simon's mind finally cracks:
"You're jocking my straps!"
"So do have a go yoursel-"
Nope!
You know this must be serious when Simon says, "Let us get cracking" instead of "Let's get cracking."
i noticed something at the start of the puzzle which lead me to have a much different ending, starting at about 37:10. that being, if you sum the 19 (half) biggest clues in the puzzle, you get 448. the cage totals are at most 1 less than their upper bound clue, so all cages sum to at most 448-19=429. only 24 away from 405, the sum of every cell in any sudoku. not quite usable, but stuck with me until i finished the 46 clue in the top right which only summed to 33 taking away half the degrees of freedom, on top of others here and there. here's my solve from 37 mins in:
first notice the 17 can only reach either of the 46 clues without breaking the cage, so is a lower bound attached to one of the 46s
summing up the maximums again knowing everything we know so far, we get 413 (tentatively using 16,18,21,22,39 as upper bounds). only 8 away from 405
this tells us that we cant replace any of the 5 tentative upper bounds with anything that is more than 8 away. the 1 and 5 clues in the bottom right are therefore definite lower bounds and cant be paired with each other. this forces the 1 and 13 cages together, taking away 3 degrees of freedom
the 17 cage is paired with a 46, we don't know which, but the logic works either one. the cage needs to sum to at least 40, and thus is a 7+ cell cage. this forces the 17 to expand around the 16, forcing the 16 to pair with the 14 as well as forcing the 5 with the 18. this removes our last degrees of freedom since out upper bounds are now 13,16,18,22,39: 8 less than before. This means that all remaining cages need to be maximal (in particular, the 17-46 is a 9 cell cage). this lets us fill in most of the remaining cages and really simplifies the end.
I literally cheered at the end of this puzzle. Nice solve, Simon!!!
Another monster of a puzzle. I loved it.
I managed to solve it, without any hints, in around 2 and a half hours. Not quick, but still happy.
I spotted a couple of pieces of logic that eluded Simon.
Firstly, and I've already seen some other comments mention this, Simon spots that r3c1 is mirrored to r6c3. But it's also mirrored to r9c2. This eliminates 5 from r9c2, and forces a 5,7 pair into box 1 which are fairly quickly resolved.
Secondly, from the point Simon reached around the one hour mark (1:00:00), I summed up all the maximums for all the cages occupying boxes 6, 8 and 9. I adjusted for known cells outside of theses cages/boxes, and found they gave a total of exactly 135 for the three boxes (= 45 x 3). So I could deduce all the cages had to in fact sum to their maximum values. This included the 46 cage starting in the left column of box 8, so this had to be 9 cells large. This made completing the puzzle a lot easier than Simon's method.
I used that logic as well for r9c2. Really big help. But I took twice as long as you did for my solve. It didn't help that I had entered two digit backwards in the bottom left. So I had to restart mid way through as I couldn't spot the mistake right away. I used cage sums throughout the puzzle. Not just to see if they used the maximum, but also to see if a cage could connect within a box or not. If two numbers connect within a box, it lowers the sum for that box. If it connects with something outside the box, you can get higher totals. In many places, I saw that if the cages were completely within a box, the total for that box was under 45 (or under 90, etc. for multiple boxes). I don't think Simon used it once. I was also surprised that near the end, I solved it faster than Simon. Simon got stuck for a long time with that 15 cage at the bottom.
@@alienrenders I made a mistake during my solve too, that almost had me despairing that I would have to restart, and I wasn't sure I was prepared to, knowing how long it had taken me so far. Luckily, I found my mistake: I'd somehow ruled out the possibility of the original 9 cell cage turning right to reach one of the 46s, and had turned it left instead. I think 'debugging' my mistake was the hardest step I had to take.
I'd had the idea box totals was going to help with the initial break-in, but didn't seem to get anywhere with it. So I kind of forgot about it until that one point towards the end. Well done if you used it throughout.
"Causing Cracking the Cryptic to Crack"
Just finished! Very proud of my time 51:29:59 That's hours, not minutes :-)
The ending of the solve was like reaching the climax of the movie.. Excellent solve. Loved it !!!
Cracking the cryptic part 2: the recrackening
The good griefening
Beware the Kraken
@@peterwright837 No maybe more like: "Release the Kraken!"
Delightful to follow along. I love the combination of spacial decisions with the other inputs.
The longer the video the more "Bobbins!" I get to hear.
Yeah, seeing it with "No views" threw me off.
I bet this one will also be bobbinsy hard
and "bobbins!". Let's not forget the bobbins ^_^
“You’ve got to be jogging my straps!” I cracked up
Simon is Winnie the Pooh 😅
Jez F C, how I love these monstrous puzzles. You get SO into it with Simon as he struggles, yet prevail!!!
I know I'm late to the game, but still.
8:05
Can't the pink box be(Starting from the 9) 1,3,1,4,5? There is no rule against same digit reappearing in the same region. It would validate us to use the number 2 in the region below.
44:37
This was a treat. Lovely logical flow and the last minute reveal to complete it with the answers I knew had to be true for uniqueness but we're stubbornly holding out to the end for logical resolution.
UI suggestion to resolve the issue with the corner pencil markings -- have the numbers/letters in the area/killer cage clues occupy that corner in the corner marking (but annotate it as being "fixed"). That way, the corner pencil marking should avoid that spot and go to the next available one.
Wouldn't it be easier to not use top left as part of a corner marking? Or perhaps start corner markings from bottom up, so only the 4th corner marking will take top left (It's not often to require that many in a cell).
I just put a "1" in. It gets hidden, but the others show.
Only works if you're not marking a "1," though.
Oh right I forgot I mentioned in prior videos but these killer cage style clues could also be top-middle, where it interferes with no corners at all.
A low cage total could actually be a little bit confusing if it counted as a corner marking and moved the next ones.
@@jaeusa160 yea that's smart
@@AldrichLukes In the case of killer sudoku cages and area notations, that is what I'm describing. If the cell does not have a puzzle notation, that corner will be available for corner markings.
This puzzle, bizarrely, starts off easy and seems to get harder the further you go.
I experienced this exact phenomenon when I solved. Some of the trickiest logic was right at the end of the puzzle.
Oddly enough, unlike Cracking the Cryptic: the movie, where I was just dumbfounded how Simon even thought of some of the steps forward, I could actually understand all of the logic all the way through. What a stroke of genius to make such a difficult puzzle all the way through, but make it so that when you watch someone else solve it, it all makes sense.
Btw, I'm not putting down Ahaupt's puzzle at all, that one started with an absolutely blisteringly hard break-in, while this one was more consistently hard up throughout
Absolutely agree. The start to the other puzzle was unfathomable.
I knew this was coming sooner rather than later
80 minutes!!!
It’s going to be a good one
I was right
A top puzzle and a quality solve
Fantastic tenacity and insight
I found a bit of logic you can use throughout the puzzle that makes the second half a lot easier if you're keeping track of it.
There are 38 clues, so there will be 19 areas. If you sum the 19 highest clues (subtracting 1 from each for the strict inequality) you get 429. This means there are only 24 degrees of freedom (429-405 because all the digits in a completed Sudoku grid sum to 405) from a perfect configuration of joining the highest half of clues with the lowest half of clues, and filling the areas with their maximum totals.
This might seem like a lot, but consider that you not only lose degrees of freedom every time an area falls short of its maximum, but also when you connect two clues from the lower half or two clues from the higher half. The two 15 clues are median clues (18th and 19th if you put them in ascending order), so the degrees lost when pairing two low clues (below 15) is the difference between the higher clue and 15, and the degrees lost when pairing two high clues (above 15) is the difference between the lower clue and 15.
For example, joining the red 15/19 clue doesn't lose any degrees, but only filling them with 17 loses 1. Joining the purple 1/13 clues loses 2 degrees right then, and would lose more if it was filled with less than 12 total. The biggest culprit is the blue 1/46 clue that is only filled with 33, that's 12 degrees lost, half the total we have.
It takes a little while for this to really matter, but there are some deductions you can make a lot earlier, like how far the red 17 (eventually 17/46) has to extend, which in turn cuts off the blue 16, forcing it into the 14. You can keep track of some as you fill it in, but you have to do some forward thinking to find where the rest of them will go. By around the 50 minute mark of Simon's solve they're all gone (or at least you know where they will go). The rest of the puzzle is a lot easier when you realise that only certain clues can be paired up and they must all have maximum totals.
Did anyone else find this, or something similar? I'm surprised Simon didn't considering he loves adding all the numbers up and thinking about degrees of freedom. He made a pretty good start without it so I guess he never had to stop and think about.
I did something similar, and I've seen a few other comments below mention it. I waited until nearing the end, and only used if for the last three boxes (6, 8 and 9), knowing they summed to 45 x 3 = 135. It certainly makes completing the red 17/46 cage a lot easier, when you know it has to be nine cells.
The "deadly patterns" actually reveal that the cells need to be within different regions in order to resolve since they are only deadly if they share the same clues.
I think Simon has a personal rule of not using uniqueness for logical deductions. The puzzle should be able to have a unique solution without having to pre-suppose it
2 days...this puzzle took me 2 days! how in the world did you do it in 80 mins....you god damn genius Simon! you never cease to impress.
Another LONG vid!
Love the solves and absolutely love the puzzles! Thank you for making my day Simon!
I love these puzzles where you need to figure out the shape of the cages/regions.
Really a beautiful puzzle. Your ability to find the hidden logic at the starts of these puzzles astounds me. I've really been liking your channel recently! For some reason, UA-cam is only suggesting Simon's videos to me, I'll have to try one of Mark's sometime soon.
1:01:01 - "No it doesn't... You're jocking my straps... This is unbelievable...!" - Simon Anthony - T-SHIRT IDEA
Thanks for the video! I tried the puzzle myself (after taking a couple days to solve the smaller example 1-6 sudoku for practice) but quickly got stuck.
Then had some good fun taking turns with Simon being stuck, feeling terribly smug when I was ahead, until I needed to watch him solve past me then pause the video again.
It meant I could actually solve much of it myself, though all in all it was too hard. Cheers!
I never thought I’d be screaming at my screen over sudoku answers
I went mad right alongside Simon during that video!
Numbers do not make sense to my brain at all, but something about watching these videos is so relaxing. And watching this mans brain work, is amazing and boggling. How I ended up watching sudoku videos I have no idea but wow I love them.
Man this puzzle took me like 3 hours to complete... I LOVE these really tough puzzles... so satisfying to finish them. More tough puzzles like this please!
I feel that an appropriate secondary name for this video would be "Cracking the Cryptic: Cracking Simon" LOL! There was a point in the video I thought the puzzle broke Simon. I love watching the videos!
What I really like about this puzzle is that the special instructions stay relevant until the end. Often you can finish a puzzle with normal sudoku once you've used the special instructions to break in and you've solved all the arrows/cages/dots, etc. In this puzzle you are still working back and forth between coloring and normal sudoku right down to the final doubles.
Got a drink and some popcorn for this movie. Did I give it a go? No.
Astounding! I had no idea where to go at all but all of Simon's explanations made perfect sense when I heard them! Now if only I could figure it out on my own...
The only bit of logic im proud of myself seeing was at the very end I saw the logic to resolve the deadly patterns. 1:17:20
Deadly pattern of 1/3 in columns 2/8, rows 4/6. The pair in column 2 is purple, if the pair in column 8 were both the same color (also purple) then its unresolvable, the only way to resolve the deadly pattern is if r6c8 were red and resolved by the fact that red already has a 3. This is the only possibility of a puzzle resolution
So for the 8/9 in column 2/9, row 7/8 we can apply the same logic, that blue region must extend somewhere and pick up another 8 or ni... craap no room... okay new plan... the only other possibility to resolve this is by cage maximum, column 9 row 7 MUST be an 8, and blue MUST add to its maximum value or else this deadly pattern will be unresolvable
The rest of the puzzle? Completely lost, but that one a saw
For puzzles like these, it would be amazing if you had support in the software to draw borders. There are a lot of puzzles that would benefit from this, I think
And it did.. lolz.. (ik tltc)
Another thrilling entry in the CTC Cinematic Universe! I love these long videos 😁
Loved the video. Thanks again for a fun puzzle solve.
I was hoping this would end up here, it looked fun but I didn't quite get through it. In general, I really appreciate how this channel makes it possible to learn how to solve puzzles of that difficulty. Otherwise, it is hard to get any sort of "clues" what to look out for.
"Today I will go sleep earlier, I need to have power for tomorrow" ... ok, I will watch quick video of Simon... oh, it is almost 1,5 hour ...
you don't watch a quick simon
you watch a quick mark
@@leporid257 I am not sure if I understood correctly, so please forgive me if not.
For me Simon is quick while Mark is going to hyperspeed instantly :)
@@lukaszpiotrluczak awww okay, then watch Simon for another while
it helps when you play Mark on 0.75x to spot what he sees, or just pause and see.
it gets better with time!
"You must be jocking my straps" - Well, that's certainly a phrase.
But seriously, a great solve video for a puzzle that I could barely get going with. Really enjoyable watch.
I've always been absolutely terrible at puzzles of all kinds but there's just something delightful about seeing someone so intelligent have so much fun with a puzzle this complicated.
At 32:44 - how did you rule out 11 connecting to the 1?
You're spoiling is with these long solves. Such a joy to watch (with a bonus of Simon's frustration, haha).
Collective noun:
"A flurry of digits".
I was fully expecting smoke to come out of Simons' ears and an overheat warning light to start flashing.
I think he'll need to lie down after this one.
It is late at night when he filmed it so i think he did go to sleep after.
Araf is the Welsh word for slow, so i guess this will take a while............
In Arabic, "Araf" is the emptiness between heaven and hell, and I think that fits better
Dear Simon,
I love your solves. Even though I would never be able to solve such a puzzle myself, you explain so well, that even I can follow you. I was a bit confused at 32:40 when you said the 1 in r1c9 can't connect to the 49 in r3c7 because it would isolate the 1 in r2c6. I thought why can't it connect to the 11 in r3c5? It took me a while to notice that r3c5 and r3c6 would then have to be 4 or less and this would make 5 cells in row 3 which have to be 4 or less which is impossible. I guess you had unconciously noticed this immediately. All in all I just want to say youre AMAZING.
I needed to pause cause this confused me for a second too. If you try to connect that 6 to the 11 clue, you'd need to make the other two cells sum to less than 4, meaning 1 and 2 or 1 and 3. There's three squares to the right that need to be 1/2/3/4 in row 3, and that would make 5 squares that would need to be the numbers 1/2/3/4.
Haha! I managed this one! 1:36:31 for my solve, and I have to agree, this was monumentally hard. I think you made a massive meal of the ending though by not cleaning up your pencil marks and by not changing the bottom right region's color earlier on. When you were stuck endlessly on the final configuration of the grid, if you had put in candidates for the bottom left box, you would have seen that the 5-18 cage was almost entirely forced immediately. r7c8 was very limited in its lower bound, and combined with the column 9 logic of "1 degree of freedom" meant that you could restrict the box 9 values heavily to provide a solution. I still loved watching the solve, and you got through the opening much, MUCH faster than I did.
Boxes 6 and 9 shook out very quickly for me when I noticed that the max values of the areas covering them were all quite low, and that the red area in box 8, with it's upper bound of 46, had the potential to pick up quite a bit of slack in boxes 6 and 9. The remaining areas (21-39, 14-22, 5-18 and 1-13) could only reach a combined maximum of 88, which it turned out was only possible if the red area extended all the way to r6c8. And that left zero degrees of freedom so I could also conclude that remaining areas were all maximal.
Not sure if that was Phistomefel's intended solve path but if it was, then the puzzle is even more elegant and genius!
apologies if he gets this later, but commenting as I watch - the key part missed early was that the two mirror cells (he mentions) in r3c1 and r6c3 must ALSO be mirrored in r9c2. This keeps the 5 in box 7 to column 3 and so puts a 5 in r1c3. This was available from about 24mins in and makes a lot of the box 1 solve and the long 45 cage solvable much earlier.
I spotted this too. It certainly helps with sorting out box 1 earlier.
I love the hour+ videos!
I feel so bad everytime Simon feels the need to apologize 😭❤ everyone knows it's easier to spot things when your watching someone else solve these.. we love u Simon, no need to apologize ❤
This was a work of art. I could tell right away that it was much too difficult for me, but watching the video made me wish so hard that it would have been able to do it. It looked like a blast to work out. And watching the solve was pure joy.
Cracking the Cryptic 2: The Crackening
Should defo put that on a tee shirt
After an hour of getting only a few cages I broke down and gave up. Having watched this now I am glad I did.
I perfectly comfortable with the fact that I couldn't do it this time.
You really amazed me with your endurance and persistence on this one.
Phistomefel tortured you all the way until the end.
32:44 why can't the 1 clue connect to the red cage with the 11 clue below it?
Same thought
Some logic that says it can’t (tho I don’t remember Simon mentioning it and was also like “why are you assuming this!”) is that R3C7 8 & 9 have to be from 1234 and so at best only one of R3C5 and R3R6 can be 1 (making the other 3 cells in Row 3 Box 3 2 3 and 4) and the other must therefore be at least 5, meaning that if the 1 connects to 11 we have 6 + 1 + 5 = 12 at a minimum, breaking it
I don’t think he saw it, but the triple 1234 to the right of the red cage disambiguates it. The two red cells containing the 11 add up to at least 6 (1+5), so it can’t be a 1/11 cage because it would add up to at least 12.
The way I resolved it was to see that both 8 and 9 had to go into row 3 in box 2. So at least one of the red squares contains either an 8 or 9. That couldn't go with a 6 in a cage with an upper limit of 11.
Not sure Simon didn't just get a little bit lucky though.
Sees video: Oh cool, a new puzzle today!
Sees runtime: Yoooo, YIKES! Ummm... I might not try to solve this one.
Took me about 2 hours in total! Really fun puzzle, and actually quite approachable. One of the few 5/5 star puzzles from LMG that I've been able to do.
Saw that it was a Phistomefel puzzle and almost declined to try it. There was a lot of staring at it, but in the end 2:08:10
Holy hell was that puzzle tough, and I had pretty close to the same bit of relief and joy as Simon on realizing the final breaking of the last deadly pattern.
Im curious if phistomefel watches these videos? And if so is he screaming about the same misses we are our just laughing at his misery?
Holy moly! He's going full Phistomefel!
[grabs macadamia nut popcorn and an iced coffee]
(0ff topic,, but serious) I lIke Macadamia nuts ... where do you get the popcorn???
@@peterkelley6344 I make my own, but Island Princess makes good [but pricey] mac nut crunch popcorn.
@@jsadvent8240 Thank you for the information.
I’ve managed to break the puzzle 3 times in an hour. Guess I’ll just sit back and enjoy the video lol
Simon's deduction at 32:45 seems like a lucky error. The 1 could belong to the unpaired 11 at this point in the puzzle based on his markings, and perhaps I missed Simon providing a justification for why it can't be. Rather, it seems he treats the unpaired 11's area as if it must be exclusive of the 1.
The actual justification requires knowing the that the bottom 3 cells in the top-middle box must contain both an 8 and 9, but he doesn't mark the 9's presence there until 39:08. After we know about the 9's presence, we can conclude that the 11's area must contain at least one of the 8 or 9. Since joining the 1 to the 11's area would add a 6, the resulting sum would be 14 at a minimum, which is not allowed. Hence the 1 cannot be paired with the 11.
Dear lord what an amazing video, thank you for the 80 minutes of pure joy!
You could tell by the last 10ish minutes Simon was going a little insane! Great puzzle