The Hardest "Easy Puzzle" Ever
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- Опубліковано 5 лют 2025
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Today's puzzle looks so easy! How can a tiny kakuro hold us up for long?! Well this is no ordinary kakuro. It comes from the mind of one of the world's great puzzle creators Sam Cappleman-Lynes and one of testers couldn't place a single digit. Give it a go at the link below:
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Rules:
Enter a single digit from 1 to 9 into each white cell so that the sum of digits in each Across entry equals the clue to the left of the entry, and the sum of digits in each Down entry equals the clue given above the entry. No digit may be repeated within a single entry.
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▶Music◀
Tim McCaskey plays Mozart's Sonata no 16 ("Sonata Facile")
▶SOFTWARE◀
Play the puzzle in the video by clicking the link under the video (above). Thanks to Sam Cappleman-Lynes and Sven Neumann for their work.
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▶ABOUT US◀
Hi! We're Simon Anthony and Mark Goodliffe, two of the UK's most enthusiastic puzzle solvers. We have both represented the UK at the World Sudoku Championships and the World Puzzle Championships. We're also "cryptic crossword" aficionados. Mark is the twelve-time winner of The Times championship and Simon is the former record holder for most consecutive correct solutions to The Listener crossword. We hope we can help your puzzle solving while also introducing you to some of the world's best puzzles.
Thank you for watching!
Simon and Mark
That feeling when you see a 16 minute video and think you'll be able to do this one, then try it for 1 hour getting nowhere at all, and then see Simon figure out the needed trick within minutes... Kudos to you for always being able to think outside of the box and look at things from the right angle Simon! I have yet to acquire that skill haha
Annoyingly there are several correct answers to this which seems to be against the spirit of the channel. Solved by guessing in 5 minutes
I must say, of late i find myself solving sudoku and speaking to myself in English with a beautiful british accent, which is at least curious for a guy from Barcelona.
Thanks CTC, not only for the puzzles but for making my English much more british and elegant.
Same here, hahaha!
And as a good friend of mine said - we can all thank this channel for adding the word 'disambiguate' into our vocabularies! :D
The more I watch these videos, the better I get at solving them.
The better I get at solving them, the more I solve by myself.
The more I solve myself the less I need to watch the video.
Except the videos are thoroughly entertaining and I still learn by watching.
A win-win.
Every day I’m faced with quite the dilemma... wanting Simon to post a mammoth hard puzzle and get tons of CTC content or wanting Simon to post an easy approachable puzzle so I can play along haha
Couldn't agree more!
And this was neither of those
Simon normally: Uses either blue and orange or purple and green to differentiate cells.
Simon today: Let's use purple and......... Red!!!
I must say, that was bloody hard to crack, I like Kakuro, and don't find it too difficult normally, but that's Sam Cappleman-Lynes for you... Legendary UA-camr, Legendary Puzzle setter as well. Mad respect for his Puzzles, they're among the best puzzles I've come across, they're as difficult as they're simple. Bloody Genius I tell you.
I was able to solve it ... the long way. Required a lot more time and had to fix a few mistakes along the way ... my initial break-in is to note how sums of 19 cannot contain a 1 and sums of 11 (or less) cannot contain a 9. Knowing this, the 10-down at r5c6 must contain 2 numbers of at least 2, thus the remaining digit (r8c6) must be 5 or less.
Simon's lightning speed at arithmetic is mind-boggling. Simple tricks such as mentally subtracting 10 from every clue before adding up must be beneath his dignity 😊
Except on one video he calculated what is the sum of four 9's and two 8's and then strugled for minutes to come up what is the sum of three 9's and three 8's. So he can add numbers fast and know almost all sums of the partitions of numbers 1 to 9, but to actually do adjustments like that sometimes takes time with him.
I tested this on the Discord server and it was as enjoyable as ever! I think the channel should feature more puzzles like these, where there's just one cute idea but it's incredibly well executed.
What a fun puzzle! I have been a kakuro fan (not wizard level) for years, but the things I have learned on this channel about doing "numerical comparisons" was the key to solving this in 30 minutes. Not being Simon, I did the across/down differences separately for each of the 4 corner areas.
P.S. What beautiful symmetry at 8:55 in the video!
that's exactly how i did, too. This was my very first Kakuro, though. And want to mention that Simon annoys me when he finds the most efficient way right away!
Great solve! i wouldn't have seen this break if it was the only one. Here is how I did it: in the bottom right square, the down entries sum to 21, the left entries to 34. So the corners of the square are bound between max 21-3=18 and min 34-17=17. So the sides of the square are 123 horizontal and 89. From here, you can go around the grid in both directions, and the upper and lower constraints of each entries will nicely play together until the finished grid. Might not be as elegant, but at least I'm just glad I put a digit!
I solved this entirely without using that trick you did, Simon. It was pretty exhausting but it is possible to write down all possible combinations and min-max them one by one until completion. Took me about 40 minutes.
I had a different break in actually, but the idea was the same. Instead of doing the across vs down for the entire board, I did it for each of the "spectacle glasses", starting with the bottom right one. Due to the 19 and the 11 clues, we can place large numbers in the down clue and small numbers in the across clue in the bottom left and top right sections respectively. From there we can continue in a similar way to fill 3/4ths of the board. Then only the top left remains, which is pretty easy to fill on its own. I managed to do it in 17 mins!
This is Simon's shortest video in a while. Must not be too bad
"Must not be too bad" 30 minutes later I am just breaking in...
"Must not be too bad". I would have stared at that grid for a solid hour and would not find that break-in....
I'm old enough to remember when these were called "Cross sums." They were my dad's favorite kind of puzzle. And they're also my favorite kind as well.
Lovely puzzle as usual from Sam. One of my favourite setters. This is also one of my favourite kakuro tricks: using sums of clues in different directions to maximise and minimise the cells left over.
Finished it in just over six minutes. Nice for my confidence in my kakuro solving, as I was absolutely humbled by my solve times during kakuro week at GM-puzzles recently.
Edit: I tend to use this method on puzzles that can be solved with much easier methods, so it's nice with a puzzle where it's necessary.
Sounds like our strategies were similar, though you worked a lot faster than me. I needed fifteen and a half minutes.
Enjoyed the little throwaway Ultravox reference at 6:56 🙂
I am *so proud* of myself! 8:21 for me. All kudos goes to Simon and Mark, though. They taught me to think geometry when staring at a grid. In kakuros I will usually look at intersections, obviously, and seeing those partitioned so neatly into 6/6 sets *immediately* made me think high/low. Once that's under the belt, the rest falls like dominoes, literally.
That was great fun!!!
Really clever puzzle. I didn't quite use the full-grid across vs down to start the way Simon did, but I tried it in the bottom three rows only and got a similar constraint on r5c2 + r5c6 + r6c4 + r7c2 + r7c6 - r6c1 - r6c7, which unravels the entire bottom half of the grid in the same way.
Oh, I did it slightly differently! I used the rows vs. columns trick in all of the smaller quadrants, starting in the bottom right. Determined one of the 2 'middle across' cells had to be a 1 and 'middle column' had to have a 9 in that quadrant, and then kept using the numbers given to do similar tricks in the other 3 quadrants. Cool puzzle!
nice elegant solution, Simon... I started with the 19s 10 and 11 in the bottom right and then worked my way round through mins and maxes and the help of the orthogonal cross difference in each square and got there as well
I solved this in a time of 6:08 ... but ONLY because I was warned to take this puzzle seriously. Rest assured, I would NEVER use the strategy I used here on just any old Kakuro.
Nice puzzle!
Wonderful setting. I've never solved a Kakuro in my life, but the trick with the leftover cells in different directions opened itself up to me very quickly. I didn't look at the time, but it didn't take me longer than 20 minutes to solve this :)
A brilliant puzzle with a brilliantly and elegantly simple break-in Kudos to Sam and Simon or Samon if you will. I am amazed at how your brain
sees the puzzle for the break-in. After a year of doing CTC puzzles I have over a 50% solve rate thanks to your "tutorials". I wonder if Mark has
had a go at this puzzle, maybe you could post a video of him solving it on Patreon. I suspect he would engage in Goodliffery and put all the possibilities which FYI is how I solved it. It would be a comparison of how both of your brilliant minds operate:) I don't know if UA-cam has a teacher of the year award, but I nominate CTC!!!!
Wow, that was beautiful. I've never seen a kakuro use whole puzzle holistic sums like that before. Just incredible
Great break-in. Never saw it coming. Once Simon gave it, the rest was practically a fill in the givens exercise!
18:24 for my solve. I didn't see the trick with the total sum of rows and columns and I'm amazed how fast Simon could spot it! I started on the bottom right corner and compared the two columns and two lines and was able to narrow down the possibilities. It basically consists in finding the same trick but on much smaller scale (easier to find but not nearly as brilliant!)
Very very nice puzzle, it was not so hard, but beautiful anyway, great content like this is much welcome!
Yup I did it the same way and in roughly the same time as well, with a bit of high-low colouring.
I solved it the same way. Whilst not as instant as Simon’s break in, I liked the way the bottom right box fairly quickly had just one degree of freedom in the “middles” and looking at the bottom left box resolved that which then propagated its way through he grid.
My god you are just so clever and interesting and I love your videos!!! I also love how exited you get about every puzzle!! Thankyou!
Where were you when I was in high school?
8:11 finish. Always loved Kukuro. Definitely prefer it to classic sudoku (though all the variants I've been introduced to on this channel are awesome). And what a break-in!
Really elegant solution with min max along the whole board.
I took the approach of checking each ring, starting with the bottom right, as the difference of sums was maximum (13). This put pressure in some cells, which in turn allowed to replicate the analysis in the adjacent ring, which causes the cells in the 4th ring to become forced.
Really kicking myself over this one haha Can't believe I couldn't find the opening move! Kudos once again Simon!
Brilliant and clever break -in,; never seen that before in a kakuro but I have never seen a Kauro on CTC before so I should have expected something clever. Once I had the hint from Simon, it was a relatively straightforward solve.
16:17 for me, I hadn't done a kakuro in a long time and i seemed to recall that they usually give a digit or two in the grid, So i guessed that the break-in would be a sums problem of sections or rows vs columns. I enjoyed the bits where the clues spun around in a box (e.g. you mark the possibles for a column and then check and eliminate on the row and then the next column and back to the last row usually limiting at least one cell to a single option and finishing the section)
6 Minutes flat, it really helps me when such puzzles are small enough so I can oversee the whole thing easily. Pretty much instantly saw the break-in, although Simon's introduction might have helped me in choosing to pursue such a start instead of spending a few minutes on regular kakuro instead. I used slightly different logic from Simon, mostly I had a 2 step process where I first looked at the four squares and only then connected them together; same end result though.
Yes of course, Simon explains everything while solving so he could've been faster, but I think I at least went through the finishing logic faster. I recognised where to start it, but also used some other logic that I haven't seen Simon mention; mainly when two kakuro hints cross with one remaining unknown cell each (besides the shared cell), you can deduce the difference between the two cells and sometimes heavily restrain them. One example where this helped me was with placing the 28 in the topleft corner.
I'm still stuck at puzzle #13 of the Killer Sudoku App, made by Sam Cappleman-Lynes. Even with the clues provided I can't see how I'd ever be able to solve it. I'd love to see it being solved by one of you guys on the channel one day. I love your videos, the high quality puzzles and the Apps. Good stuff!
I really liked this puzzle, now I am gonna have to look into more of them.
I really liked how he thought of the totals, I never would have thought about that buts as soon as he mentioned it I somehow actually followed along lol.
What an interesting puzzle! Definitely didn't see the across v. down relationship across the entire puzzle, but was able to make my way through starting from the bottom right square. Took me a while to whittle away by coloring to relate different entries, but well worth it!
I never cared much for Kakuro, but this was brilliant! I didn't find the break-in so just enjoyed the video - I regret not taking a CtC "sudoku approach" to the puzzle, I've just never seen a smart kakuro set.
yeah kakuro!
solved it in 7:58, got some clue of what to do knowing that it's difficult to place any digit
Very surprised to have cleared it in 20 mins, but it did help to know that it was tricky enough to stump a tester, so stopped and thought about a break-in. After the break-in, you can do some nice things noting relative values of cells (I used coloured sets and corner pencil marks).
Thoroughly enjoyed it, thanks!
I commented on this already the last time Mark solved a kakuro on the channel, and I'm going to mention it one more time, as it is a bit of a pet peeve of mine: the pronunciation of "kakuro" by the channel hosts deviates pretty significantly from the standard Japanese pronunciation. Of course, when borrowing a loan word into another language, it is expected that the pronunciation will be changed somewhat, but in this case I think it would be nice if M&S could get a little closer to the Japanese pronunciation. My advice for doing so: do not place stress on the "ku" syllable. If anything, de-emphasize it; this syllable is spoken very quickly in Japanese. A cheat for a native English speaker which gets close to the Japanese pronunciation is to stress the first syllable only, and not the others. You can think of the word MODULO - - how the first syllable is the one that is stressed, not the second. For reference, you can hear a native speaker of Japanese clearly pronounce the word at the 0:11 in this video, and once again about four seconds after that: ua-cam.com/video/z8ZQQ82WSz4/v-deo.html. This is the last time I will mention this; after this I will shut up about it. That's all. Cheers.
So it's like how New Yorkers pronounce "cock-a-roach."
@@brock2k1 I've never heard that. Funny. Sounds like a ride in an amusement park. Tilt-A-Whirl, Cock-A-Roach.
I like how your shirt matches the Kakuro theme color... brilliant puzzle, love the channel
"Hello, and welcome to *****day's edition of Cracking the Cryptic!" is quickly becoming a daily utterance in my household, much in the style of "Nooorm!" from Cheers lol. I got the day wrogn today smh
I love this puzzle, simply stated. It is so nice, and has a terrific break-in
Amazing break in, great job Simon.
loved that break in to this puzzle took some thinking to create such genius
New to the channel, old sudoku fan - but I didn't know about kakuros! What an interesting puzzle. Now it makes me wonder if you guys would enjoy nanograms/picross.
Love Kakuro! Would love to see more of these :)
The break in was literally the first I thought off, I have been watching CtC too much :*D
It's also something that would be a little more intuitive to someone who does a lot more Kakuro because that broad rows vs. columns math is a standard in that world. Still certainly a good find though, especially for someone for whom this isn't their main puzzle type.
@@josephnation9063 yes it's standard, but i've dismissed it because there were too many cells that wouldn't cancel because they would be only H or only V... :">
The finest break in to a kakuro I can imagine
Let's see, one of his testers could not solve it and this ends up being one of his shortest videos. The man is a genius.
In fairness to the tester, this is one of those puzzles where you either see the trick and can crank out a quick solution, or you don't and are completely stuck.
Simon seems to do that a lot.@@AaronRotenberg
@@AaronRotenberg You don't need the trick Simon used. You can min-max the options over and over as well, combined with some short 'what if's' along the corner, realizing the 19 in the bottom row always needs a 1 and the 12 going down on its left square always needing a 1, etc.
8:15 I didn't expect my solve to be shorter than the video today !
Quite easy when having spotted the right way but nonetheless enjoyable 🙃
Had to watch the video for the break-in, tried something with the difference in the rings but didn't think about the whole thing. Bloody brilliant. Managed to get the rest after that break-in pretty easy though
I solved the puzzle and the checker told me it was wrong, so I came back to the video and skipped to the end to check my answer and saw it tell you yours (which is the same as mine) was wrong and felt much better
11:34 - looking at the squares is fun, start from the bottom-right and work towards the top-left
I wonder how Jason Z would do with a puzzle like this? Simon featured him on the channel a couple years ago solving a very large kakuro in lightning speed just by doing quick calculations between adjacent sums. We will see him on National TV again in a couple weeks as the #1 seed in the Jeopardy tournament of champions - seems like a good time for CTC to piggyback on that appearance and get him on the channel again.
7:42 min. I wanted a Kakuro to be published within this week and finally it has happened. And being Sam's puzzle is just a 🍒 on the 🍰
I managed to do it before watching the video, took me about an hour and I was completely heartbroken when using the check function.
Thanks for clearing up that it doesn't work lol
Brilliant break-in.
I was looking for how to start it.. you are a genius, all 9 and all 1s.. geez
13:42. Still slower than Simon once you subtract the introduction and his various explanations, but I’m thrilled to have a solve that is less than the video length, vs. my normal solve that is usually 2-4 times as long as the video, and often requires watching part of the video for hints. Clever break-in, but then it is quite straightforward after that.
What a break in -- I never saw that coming!!
28:00 for me. I spotted the trick but I applied it to each quadrant vs globally. It led to some really cool logic down that path too. But it was slower.
16 minutes but I've cleared my diary for the next 2 hours ! Now what will I do?
back catalogue for the win
You try to solve the puzzle yourself!
you can test other great puzzles on the Discord server ;)
@@stanvandervoort2240 a 45 minute run to a broken puzzle
Brilliant break-in!
This was my first kakuro and I was intially very disappointed when the software said "that doesn't look right" and I was sure I had gotten it right. Then I watched the video and luckily Simon got the same end result. Wheeew. But I went about solving this very differently. I had do these sort of "what ifs" that got pretty complicated. But in the end I got the same result so I'm happy.
16 minute video: Short for Cracking the Cryptic, but long for a Kakuro puzzle
I didn't need your fancy breakin to solve the puzzle . Just considering minimums and maximums was enough. e.g. a 19 clue can't contain a one, and a 10 clue can't contain an 8 or 9. The Goodliffe notation which you mock a lot was actually quite helpful.
That's an excellent puzzle which I would have had no idea how to approach a year ago, despite playing kakuro for years. Clearly some of the lessons of the channel are rubbig off.
Now to see how far I was from the optimal solution, given it took me twice as long as the video.
Didn't think about adding the clues. That would have been easier. My way was in the bottom right with the interaction between the 19 across and the 10,11,11 down clues. That eliminates 9 from the 19 leaving 8 in one of the two 11s. Makes the top cell of the 10 clue at least 4 and the 19 across hitting the 2nd cell means a 1 can't be there leaving the bottom cell as 123 putting the 8 in the first 11 cage. From there it's a bunch of slogging around, but perfectly doable.
I suppose people who do a lot of Killer Sudoku and Kakuro puzzles probably will have memorised all the various different ways of making a given total with a certain number of digits (for instance, 10 in 3 must be 1+2+7, 1+3+6, 1+4+5 or 2+3+5); and then, knowing how different groups adding to those totals could share digits at the intersections makes it a bit like a numeric Jigword. There are obvious points in the grid where low and high totals intersect, forcing extreme digits away from the intersections and into the squares that only belong to one clue.
So now even CTC making Shorties :D Delightful logic, as always
You can also do this by looking at just the 3x3 areas, like the bottom right has a sum of two that's 13 more than another sum of two. Looking at the full grid is much easier though.
I'm sure a year ago I would have had no idea how to do this one. Not too bad if you've watched enough of Simon's break-ins. :D
Fun puzzle. It required a lot of incremental restriction of maxima and minima, which suited my brain quite well.
I am not at all a kakuro wizz (sp?), in fact i've barely done any. But from knowing that one of the testers couldn't place a digit, i immediately started looking for a trick, and thus found it easily. Struggled a lot more with the rest of the puzzle actually (partly due to calculation errors)
I didn't think of adding up all the totals, but still managed it in about 15 minutes using a more drawn out method with the squares.
Same with me, instead of adding up all the totals I took the 3x3 squares individually. Bottom right has a difference of 34-21=13 max sum 18 means the horizontal pair are at most 5 and that puts just enough pressure across the the bottom left 3x3 to resolve it and so on. A lot of pencil marking and following the options round the grid to knock out a digit so Simon's is much cleaner but still I got there in the end.
Same, though it took me quite a bit longer than 15 minutes. Maybe 45, but then a mistake took me another 10 minutes to fix.
Looks like we're back on the legacy app - I'm guessing the new app is being updated in some way? Just wondering when it will be back - I'm getting addicted to multi-colour mode!
I got pretty rusty at Kakuro, I have to say. 😉 Took me half an hour. Nice puzzle!
You are a genius
First time I've ever seen a kakuro but I've managed to solve it. Took me almost an hour. 😇
27:16 is my time. I didn't use the sums like Simon did. You can actually get several digits with normal logic. You can fill in the entirety of the upper right "ring" including the vertical 11 segment. After that, it gets a bit difficult.
That break-in was brilliantly deduced. dunno if I'd ever have found it.
My best guessing, only perchance happened to be right in the bottom right, as the vertical 10,11,11 restricted the 19 enough that I assumed the 10 likely had to be 235/145 to appease both 19's; but that wasnt enough for a breakin. just lucky guessing.
I got my breakin just looking at the bottom corner and comparing the 19+15 with the 11+10, thus the middle cells had to have a difference of 13. This meant, 789 in r6c7 and r8c7 & 123 in r7c6 & r7c8. The 9 & 1 could be eliminated from r6c7, and from there I was able to move into the next corners. Fun puzzle!
I actually solved this without the 1-9 trick. You can solve to bottom right part of the corner (or most of the numbers) and after that you can solve top right corner and so on. Making lots of killer sudokus helped with this one. But obviously my solve took me 25minutes and the way Simon spotted this 1-9 trick was sooo much better.
Also next time please tell in description that the app can't check the solve! I wasted 10 minutes trying to understand what was wrong with my solve until I just checked what Simon got and they were identical :/
Better late then not showing up at all. Goodday to everyone. I will enjoy this nice gift now.
The 14 sum at 11:46 was resolvable immediately because of the 68 below it forcing it to be 5 and 9.
22'30" for me. I like these min-max exercises, and this one did that beautifully
I thought the next step after working the missing digits from the across and down clues was to take each box separately and repeat the process of finding the difference of the unincluded digits in each box.
It would be nice if "Marge's" puzzle was linked here as I do not have twitter but would enjoy sharing the Marge experience. I can't put the Sudoku into an empty grid as I had hoped as I cannot read the cage clues in the screen shot available at the start of this video.
You can view the tweets without a Twitter account.
There are no cage clues that I can see. It looks like a classic Sudoku to me. 0s are empty cells.
1 906 801 000
2 800 040 000
3 074 003 000
4 607 030 000
5 090 407 010
6 000 090 508
7 000 600 950
8 000 010 006
9 000 305 702
@@ragnkja Thank you. I did not know that but it worked after a bit of google as to how.
@@ragnkja Thank you.
Wasn't it one of the videos on 20 April? I haven't watched it yet, but it's the thumbnail.
I’m here for the Bobbins!
35:55, I kept rechecking my math to make sure I was doing it right. I feel like I should have set up a spreadsheet cause I was doing the same math over and over.
To be honest, I saw Simon highlighting the cells in a square when I moused over the thumbnail, which gave me the idea of how to solve it.
EDIT: Watching a bit of the video, it seems that I brute forced it instead of doing the clever math. I went though basically every quadrant, figured out the biggest/smallest every cell could be in the "2, 4, 6, 8" cells, then used the connecting sums to narrow that down where needed.
18:43. Extremely daunting at first, but overall pretty approachable.
I’m usually bad at such calculative puzzles, but I’m surprised I could solve it in under 20!!
I am not a puzzle constructor, but a cool idea would be a sandwich sudoku combined with a no consecutive numbers restriction that started off with no numbers or symbols inside the grid.
CtC already does that. If you get the Miracle Sudoku app there are many nonconsecutive sandwich sudokus in there.
All the Sudokus in the Miracle app are nonconsecutive, and with most of them they are combined with either thermos, anti-king, andi-knight and sandwich.
The break-in idea to this puzzle would work if the puzzle were some sub-structure inside a larger grid?
Just as an FYI - if you're using the web app to do this puzzle, then the "check solution" button will NOT work. It checks it against classic Sudoku rules. (I was driving myself crazy trying to figure out what mistake I had made.)
Same! Thought I was going mad!
I spent an hour squeezing highs and lows everywhere but I did it in the end.
edit: started watching the video, when he said "i wonder if a theres a big difference between the acrosses and the downs" I redid it in 10 minutes
How was Simon able to fill a single cell with two different colors? I cannot find any shortcut key and when I try to implement a second color, it overrides the first. I have found many cases when having two colors would be helpful to visualize!
I'm not sure it's available to us yet?
13:37. Easy compared to most other puzzles here.
Argh, I never thought to total *all* of the across and downs... but I did do a smaller version of the same logic in each "ring" starting with the bottom right, which worked out, just not as smoothly.