Fantastic puzzle, just solved it earlier today. Thanks to Myxo. 21:36 Actually two arrows could overlap if for instance it was a 3 arrow with one two and a 6 arrow that ran all the way througn the 3 circle. But r2c8 can't be red because it according to the rules would be a 5-cell arrow (since it runs until the region ends).
Glad I managed to sneak in solving this one before the (inevitable) feature that I knew would come! Very much enjoyed this - although I am curious to see if Simon finds the same stumbling block I had in the middle. Beyond that, it's a neat idea and executed very well (as expected from Myxo!). Also doesn't leave one with a huge amount of horrible irregular at the end. Certainly recommended.
Interesting, I solved it without using the law of leftovers there! I do remember having to do some other tricky stuff with how row 4 sums and regions interacted with each other. Not sure if my way or Simon's way was the intended one! Tricky either way.
This was a strange (wonderful) one for me as well. I got stuck and thought about it for a long time and I don't remember what happened, but suddenly I had it and everything resolved. I couldn't even tell you what the logical step was to get there. Either way, I loved the puzzle.
@@prodigis. Of course it's highly amusing how Simon makes it through the trickier stuff with aplomb and then completely ignores the sudoku for quite some time!
only slightly more infuriating than at 52:56 where he doesn't spot the 6 in row 1, but immediately after uses that same 6 to rule out a less useful clue. We all get similar tunnel vision I guess.
Just lovely. I wouldn’t have realized the law of leftovers bits for quite a while. A really good tool for these chaos regions. Thanks for the birthday shoutout. The Sam who wrote in on this one for me is the same one who you shouted out two days ago actually. Our birthdays are two days apart. 😊
53:25 "This is not 6” You're killing me. Things like this used to cause comments of the type "He does it on purpose to generate comments for the UA-cam algorithm". These days I just accept it's Simon being Simon.
@@RichSmith77 I laughed out loud when he said that. Good stuff 😂 I'm sure I'd miss many more things than that if I tried recording a sudoku solve all the way through while explaining my thought process aloud, so I definitely don't hold these things against him
I got to where Simon was at around minute 35, and then hit a brick wall. After half an hour of no progress I gave up and decided to watch Simon's solve. However, as often seems to be the case, just hearing Simon calmly making progress through the early stages seemed to reset my brain, and I saw the break through. Law of Left Overs on the top three rows! (Before Simon mentioned it). I paused the video and continued with my solve. Reached the solution about forty minutes later. 🎉
What a complicated way to deduce that none of the arrow in the red region could be 3 cells long. A much easier way is to say that if a one of them was 3 cells long, the sum of all the arrow would be at least 28 (the minimum sum of 7 different digits), which would be more 27 (3 times max 9).
They tend to be very enthusiastic in their video titles, so I guess there will be many more 'best ... of the year' of 'best ever ...' puzzles this year :)
(The constructor) is one of those people with a "planet-sized brain". The remark tickled me for some reason - your unassuming modesty is quite an endearing quality Simon.
20:50 For the knot marked with one to be in the red region, its arrow would have to go downward into the region, but not just two squares. It would have to extend all the way to the end of the region, per the rule that arrow tips are followed by region borders. Therefore it would have had to include all of the bottom arrow, the three knot total and be itself included in the upward arrow. That is not possible, but Simon's logic was not sufficient here.
Brilliant. 63 min for me. I got stuck at exactly the same place where Simon "hit a brick wall". Took me longer than him to think of the trick to get past it. Honestly that was the best step in the puzzle, though, so I was glad I persevered. Very clever.
Simon, your solves are always fantastic, and I feel that the only issue you're having is that the pressure you have not to get stuck is preventing you from taking the time needed to slow down and check if you've missed anything in your pencil marks
I can beat or match Simon on a lot of puzzles, but he has the ability to found his way through more often than I do. In this case, I got stuck after building regions in half the puzzle. It was the law of leftovers trick that I didn’t spot.
I finished in 90:55 minutes. Mark was right. This was an incredible puzzle that had a fantastic ruleset with a great execution. There were so many cool parts that made my brain light up with joy spotting the. I think my favorite part was seeing the region that spawned from r4c1 was limited based on the cells in the six cells above the circle on the northern line from the 4 arrow. Only one possible scenario worked and it is incredible that it worked out that way. The ending was also fantastic. I was always surprised at how powerful the region change rule after an arrow was in this puzzle. Every time I got stuck on the coloring, that rule came to the rescue. A wonderful puzzle that is expected from the great Myxo. Great Puzzle!
This was hilarious watching Simon continually refuse to do sudoku at so many times during the game. It was particularly pertinent when Simon was saying "I'd REALLY like to to know what this cell is" (R6C9) with R6C6 or R6C7 being a red 7 pointing at it. 😆 On the other hand it's absolutely astonishing to watch the other logic Simon finds to complete the sudoku using minimal sudoku! 😯
Can we please force Simon to do at least 100 normal sudokus in a row, just to get him back on track and possibly not miss all the obvious sudoku clues?
2h40m... 1st time I did not gave up a puzzle too hard for me. Now I need to watch the video... and cry when Simon apologies for beeing too slow 😅 Edit : always incredible how the logic appears just 2 minutes before Simon explanation, and never appears without yim. You are a magician !
I liked Simon's novel explanation 27:20 for why none of the arrows out of r5c8 could be 3 cells long. But somewhat surprised he didn't simply apply the same technique he used to determine the minimum value. I.e. If one of the arrows did extend, there'd be 7 arrow cells. The minimum value for the arrow is determined by the triangular number for 7. Which is 28. And dividing that by 3 to get the minimum value of the circle, you get 9⅓, which is just a little too big.
@@SwordOfBlueThunder I explained it porely. Fill the grid such that each row and column contains 0-9. Split the grid into 9 regions such that each region has 0-9. Schrodringer cells (can?) have each number in seperate regions.
A 21:20, R2C8 can't be in the red region because its arrow heading south would be 5 cells long, summing to at least 15 which exceeds the 9 that can be placed in its circle. Also, the three arrows from R5C8 would include 7 different cells for a total of at least 28, divided three ways requiring a value larger than 9 in the circle. The two circles containing the same value is not an issue.
@1:03:00 I was nearly screaming at the screen at you to notice the corner noted 7's in R6C6-7 to solve R6C9. ... Mostly because I was stuck in the step afterwards for a while.
Great puzzle. Got a hint where Simon first got stuck with the suggestion to use law of leftovers. Then again a little later where I had just missed something simple. I do like chaos construction puzzles.
Very cool puzzle; 47:13 for me. A lot of these free-form puzzles are really focused on placing the regions, and I was surprised to see those initial regions fall so easily. But the digits themselves were quite a challenge! A lot of fun from start to finish.
Yes, the two 7s in row 6 were pointing at column 9, however Simon got to that point inappropriately. He had earlier ruled 7 out of r7c7 because the 7 down there was meant for red. When in fact 7 could have been and was red in r6c6.
Not inappropriate. He just slightly misspoke. The 7 corner pencilmarks were for the red 7, and r7c7 could no longer be that 7. (It could still be a 7 in yellow though, but that doesn't matter).
40:31 for me. I was baffled how the bottom half could be determined. Somehow i managed to find the correct way. Either instinct or experience led me to the correct logic.
I admit to needing a hint on this one: I missed the logic at the 40:00 point of the video. Maybe if I spent more time I would have seen it, but I'm trying not to let another backlog of a dozen or so puzzles happen to me again. Nice puzzle!
53:25 This just made me laugh: He sees that r4c6 can't be 6 moment after he says he can't resolve the 36 pair in row 5 (and limits 7s to row 6, without giving a eureka for the yellow box) , but doesn't apply it to that pair as well. Typical Simon, brilliant and still flummoxed.
53:04 - how did he eliminate a 7 from Row 7 column 7? Seems like the yellow 7 can be there, and the red 7 can be in Row 6 Column 6, with the yellow region taking its 9th cell from Row 6 column 7. That cell (R7C7), in fact, wound up being a 7.
@@charliecarrot Right, but he says "this can't be 7 anymore, because 7 is the red digit". But that's wrong, the red digit can be Row 6 Column 6, and that yellow digit can also be 7. And that is in fact what wound up happening, although this didn't foul up the puzzle so he never really noticed.
At 22:00, couldn't you have a 1-3-4 arrow adding up to eight, with the four in the circle above and a two cell arrow of 1-3? I'm sure that's easy to disprove for other reasons, but seems to be overlooked.
Simon overlooked it, but the true reason there couldn't be an arrow going down into red was that it wouldn't stop until it reached the red region border five cells away.
I'm always a bit sad when Simon does quite long solves several days in a row. My MO is to do a solve myself, then (time permitting) watch the video afterwards. But I'm not an especially strong (and certainly not a fast) solver, so if the video is much over an hour I'm likely to either spend multiple hours (and often fail, which is a bummer) or not make the attempt. I'm always excited when the video is in my sweet spot of 40-60 minutes. Obviously I can try the Mark puzzle instead (and often do), but my solving style seems much more aligned with Simon's. Now, Simon should absolutely do the puzzles that give him (and secondarily the largest swath of viewers) the most joy, so consider this a data point rather than an actual complaint. My "use case" for CtC might be rare.
I'm in a similar place. I think it's worth watching some of Simon's longer videos and working through them with him, meaning you try to make some progress for a reasonable amount of time, but when you get stuck, find the spot in the video where Simon can get you unstuck, then try to work the puzzle from there until you get stuck and repeat the above. It's time consuming and you may reasonably not have the time or energy to do that every time there is a longer video. But if you do it some of the time, it will help slowly but surely extend your capacity to solve more challenging puzzles. That's how I've made progress from not being able to solve any CtC videos to being able to solve the 30-60 minute puzzles more often than not and once in a (pretty rare) while, one of the 60+ minute puzzles.
One tip can be to at least watch Simon explaining the rules (helps a lot if they are not "standard" rules you know). Then just watch the first few minutes of his solve (in a 1h+ videos first five minutes is usually just pointing you in a direction, but it can point you in the right direction. I really enjoy the long videos, but I sometimes have to "save" them for the Week-End (or when I have time).
Simon is JUST trolling us isn't he??? It is DRAMA everyday recently!! 7s in the row was today's "Peak moment of the day"... But imagine having the region on left with two arrows... And 5 cells with one cell on both arrows meant it had to be minimum 16, which is what it could be... 79 was forced in the BLUE region all along! If video length is the target metroc, the drama is just not worth it.
55:54 for my time (not so relevant as I did have use of Simon's pointing out to the leftovers from row 3, after being stuck for too long at this point). That was a nice puzzle, with a good flow to it.
My favorite part of watching these is I catch all of the things Simon misses, yet I could never figure this out on my own
The left over deduction at 37:29 was very elegant
Fantastic puzzle, just solved it earlier today. Thanks to Myxo. 21:36 Actually two arrows could overlap if for instance it was a 3 arrow with one two and a 6 arrow that ran all the way througn the 3 circle. But r2c8 can't be red because it according to the rules would be a 5-cell arrow (since it runs until the region ends).
Glad I managed to sneak in solving this one before the (inevitable) feature that I knew would come! Very much enjoyed this - although I am curious to see if Simon finds the same stumbling block I had in the middle. Beyond that, it's a neat idea and executed very well (as expected from Myxo!). Also doesn't leave one with a huge amount of horrible irregular at the end. Certainly recommended.
Same here! That row 2/3 madness will linger with me for some time
Edit: and of course he smashed that step in 7 minutes...this man is built different
Interesting, I solved it without using the law of leftovers there! I do remember having to do some other tricky stuff with how row 4 sums and regions interacted with each other. Not sure if my way or Simon's way was the intended one! Tricky either way.
This was a strange (wonderful) one for me as well. I got stuck and thought about it for a long time and I don't remember what happened, but suddenly I had it and everything resolved. I couldn't even tell you what the logical step was to get there. Either way, I loved the puzzle.
@@prodigis. Of course it's highly amusing how Simon makes it through the trickier stuff with aplomb and then completely ignores the sudoku for quite some time!
Waiting patiently for Simon to use the horizontal 7 pencil park looking at the 67...
yeah, the number of times he looked at the circle clue on c9 and not realized it was a 6 because of the 7 pencil marks to the left is astonishing.
only slightly more infuriating than at 52:56 where he doesn't spot the 6 in row 1, but immediately after uses that same 6 to rule out a less useful clue. We all get similar tunnel vision I guess.
Why he uses pencil marks and then totally ignores them frustrates the bejesus out of me.
This is all part of the Simon charm! Amazing deductions with the fancy rules but overlooking the basic sudoku. I wouldn't have it any other way
Yes, I was also waiting "patiently" 😅
Just lovely. I wouldn’t have realized the law of leftovers bits for quite a while. A really good tool for these chaos regions.
Thanks for the birthday shoutout. The Sam who wrote in on this one for me is the same one who you shouted out two days ago actually. Our birthdays are two days apart. 😊
Myxo is such an exceptional setter. More brilliance and cherish seeing Simon work his deductions in solving!!
52:56 "I must know the order of that" surely you must XD
53:25 "This is not 6”
You're killing me.
Things like this used to cause comments of the type "He does it on purpose to generate comments for the UA-cam algorithm". These days I just accept it's Simon being Simon.
@@RichSmith77 I laughed out loud when he said that. Good stuff 😂 I'm sure I'd miss many more things than that if I tried recording a sudoku solve all the way through while explaining my thought process aloud, so I definitely don't hold these things against him
I got to where Simon was at around minute 35, and then hit a brick wall. After half an hour of no progress I gave up and decided to watch Simon's solve. However, as often seems to be the case, just hearing Simon calmly making progress through the early stages seemed to reset my brain, and I saw the break through. Law of Left Overs on the top three rows! (Before Simon mentioned it). I paused the video and continued with my solve. Reached the solution about forty minutes later. 🎉
I was watching those 7 pencil marks forever. 🙂
Agree with Simon, this puzzle is brilliant!!
What a complicated way to deduce that none of the arrow in the red region could be 3 cells long. A much easier way is to say that if a one of them was 3 cells long, the sum of all the arrow would be at least 28 (the minimum sum of 7 different digits), which would be more 27 (3 times max 9).
Every third or fourth puzzle seems to be labelled the best of the year.
Well, since the year is still young, logically it should be like that.
They tend to be very enthusiastic in their video titles, so I guess there will be many more 'best ... of the year' of 'best ever ...' puzzles this year :)
(The constructor) is one of those people with a "planet-sized brain". The remark tickled me for some reason - your unassuming modesty is quite an endearing quality Simon.
That made me laugh, it's a new way for Simon to eulogize the constructor of a beautiful puzzle.
Yellow and Red needed a 7, which will fall itno columns 6 and 7 irrespective of which one gets which, disambiguating the 79 pair in orange.
My birthday today. Just seeing Simon and Mark living their best life and producing great wholesome content everyday is worth more than any shoutout
Well, I'm not a Swifty...but I think if a CTC superfan is a possibility, I think I'd like to be called a "Secret." Yay? Nay?
20:50 For the knot marked with one to be in the red region, its arrow would have to go downward into the region, but not just two squares. It would have to extend all the way to the end of the region, per the rule that arrow tips are followed by region borders. Therefore it would have had to include all of the bottom arrow, the three knot total and be itself included in the upward arrow. That is not possible, but Simon's logic was not sufficient here.
Brilliant. 63 min for me. I got stuck at exactly the same place where Simon "hit a brick wall". Took me longer than him to think of the trick to get past it. Honestly that was the best step in the puzzle, though, so I was glad I persevered. Very clever.
Simon, your solves are always fantastic, and I feel that the only issue you're having is that the pressure you have not to get stuck is preventing you from taking the time needed to slow down and check if you've missed anything in your pencil marks
I can beat or match Simon on a lot of puzzles, but he has the ability to found his way through more often than I do. In this case, I got stuck after building regions in half the puzzle. It was the law of leftovers trick that I didn’t spot.
TIME MACHINE REQUIRED...! You need to go back in time, and add this puzzle to your Greatest Hits Books...!
I finished in 90:55 minutes. Mark was right. This was an incredible puzzle that had a fantastic ruleset with a great execution. There were so many cool parts that made my brain light up with joy spotting the. I think my favorite part was seeing the region that spawned from r4c1 was limited based on the cells in the six cells above the circle on the northern line from the 4 arrow. Only one possible scenario worked and it is incredible that it worked out that way. The ending was also fantastic. I was always surprised at how powerful the region change rule after an arrow was in this puzzle. Every time I got stuck on the coloring, that rule came to the rescue. A wonderful puzzle that is expected from the great Myxo. Great Puzzle!
This was hilarious watching Simon continually refuse to do sudoku at so many times during the game. It was particularly pertinent when Simon was saying "I'd REALLY like to to know what this cell is" (R6C9) with R6C6 or R6C7 being a red 7 pointing at it. 😆 On the other hand it's absolutely astonishing to watch the other logic Simon finds to complete the sudoku using minimal sudoku! 😯
Can we please force Simon to do at least 100 normal sudokus in a row, just to get him back on track and possibly not miss all the obvious sudoku clues?
I can't believe Simon was able to solve without noticing the red 7 in row 6 (making r6c9 a 6)
Brilliant and very approachable puzzle.
2h40m... 1st time I did not gave up a puzzle too hard for me. Now I need to watch the video... and cry when Simon apologies for beeing too slow 😅
Edit : always incredible how the logic appears just 2 minutes before Simon explanation, and never appears without yim. You are a magician !
I liked Simon's novel explanation 27:20 for why none of the arrows out of r5c8 could be 3 cells long.
But somewhat surprised he didn't simply apply the same technique he used to determine the minimum value.
I.e.
If one of the arrows did extend, there'd be 7 arrow cells.
The minimum value for the arrow is determined by the triangular number for 7.
Which is 28.
And dividing that by 3 to get the minimum value of the circle, you get 9⅓, which is just a little too big.
Sounds like it's time to work on a chaos construction with shrodringer cells where each digit is in a single region, rather than the cells.
Is that then just philomino rules?
@@SwordOfBlueThunder I explained it porely. Fill the grid such that each row and column contains 0-9. Split the grid into 9 regions such that each region has 0-9. Schrodringer cells (can?) have each number in seperate regions.
A 21:20, R2C8 can't be in the red region because its arrow heading south would be 5 cells long, summing to at least 15 which exceeds the 9 that can be placed in its circle.
Also, the three arrows from R5C8 would include 7 different cells for a total of at least 28, divided three ways requiring a value larger than 9 in the circle.
The two circles containing the same value is not an issue.
Fun puzzle although I found it quite tough. Thanks for sharing it.
@1:03:00 I was nearly screaming at the screen at you to notice the corner noted 7's in R6C6-7 to solve R6C9.
... Mostly because I was stuck in the step afterwards for a while.
Great puzzle. Got a hint where Simon first got stuck with the suggestion to use law of leftovers. Then again a little later where I had just missed something simple. I do like chaos construction puzzles.
About 2 hours for me. Had to watch Simon
such a cool idea smoothly set ...
Interesting looking puzzle. Construction puzzles are always an amazing watch.
Very cool puzzle; 47:13 for me. A lot of these free-form puzzles are really focused on placing the regions, and I was surprised to see those initial regions fall so easily. But the digits themselves were quite a challenge! A lot of fun from start to finish.
Yes, the two 7s in row 6 were pointing at column 9, however Simon got to that point inappropriately. He had earlier ruled 7 out of r7c7 because the 7 down there was meant for red. When in fact 7 could have been and was red in r6c6.
Not inappropriate. He just slightly misspoke. The 7 corner pencilmarks were for the red 7, and r7c7 could no longer be that 7. (It could still be a 7 in yellow though, but that doesn't matter).
A Douglas Adams callout for a 42nd birthday followed by "planet-sized brain." Simon is one hoopy frood.
Really elegant construction.
40:31 for me. I was baffled how the bottom half could be determined. Somehow i managed to find the correct way. Either instinct or experience led me to the correct logic.
I admit to needing a hint on this one: I missed the logic at the 40:00 point of the video. Maybe if I spent more time I would have seen it, but I'm trying not to let another backlog of a dozen or so puzzles happen to me again.
Nice puzzle!
Enjoyed this alot after the quincunx debacle.
at 24:06 I'm seeing a certain suspicious shape... Guess my mind has been tarnished from all the memes.
116:45, yeah, I needed help with the set theory in the top three rows, then had a bad deduction near the end and had to undo a bunch.
00:49:59 for me. Definitely agree with Mark. Great puzzle! Kind comment.
53:25 This just made me laugh: He sees that r4c6 can't be 6 moment after he says he can't resolve the 36 pair in row 5 (and limits 7s to row 6, without giving a eureka for the yellow box) , but doesn't apply it to that pair as well.
Typical Simon, brilliant and still flummoxed.
1:36:49
Really lovely
20:53 yes you could. it could be three cells arrow hitting that circle below
1:26:35 - The top half was pretty straightforward but the rest was a real challenge.
7:05 Aren't cages already covering that?
Like the red 7 telling us the yellow is 6 not 7. Figuring it out as I type this.
53:04 - how did he eliminate a 7 from Row 7 column 7? Seems like the yellow 7 can be there, and the red 7 can be in Row 6 Column 6, with the yellow region taking its 9th cell from Row 6 column 7. That cell (R7C7), in fact, wound up being a 7.
He only had those 7 pencil marks there because he knew the last cell in the red region was a 7
@@charliecarrot Right, but he says "this can't be 7 anymore, because 7 is the red digit". But that's wrong, the red digit can be Row 6 Column 6, and that yellow digit can also be 7. And that is in fact what wound up happening, although this didn't foul up the puzzle so he never really noticed.
53:13 Simon refusing to do sudoku
can't believe he took over 10 mins to 1:04:20 to spot tgat
73:18 for me - I needed a hint from Simon.
At 22:00, couldn't you have a 1-3-4 arrow adding up to eight, with the four in the circle above and a two cell arrow of 1-3? I'm sure that's easy to disprove for other reasons, but seems to be overlooked.
Simon overlooked it, but the true reason there couldn't be an arrow going down into red was that it wouldn't stop until it reached the red region border five cells away.
Chants for a three in the corner.
Could have still got away with Christmas Three seeing as it's 12th night.
at 53:20 Why couldn't r7c7=7=r6c6 ?
53:00 Siiimooooooonnnnnn!!!!!! 6 and 7
Simon, why do you even bother to write pencil marks when you are constantly ignoring them?
I'm always a bit sad when Simon does quite long solves several days in a row. My MO is to do a solve myself, then (time permitting) watch the video afterwards. But I'm not an especially strong (and certainly not a fast) solver, so if the video is much over an hour I'm likely to either spend multiple hours (and often fail, which is a bummer) or not make the attempt. I'm always excited when the video is in my sweet spot of 40-60 minutes. Obviously I can try the Mark puzzle instead (and often do), but my solving style seems much more aligned with Simon's. Now, Simon should absolutely do the puzzles that give him (and secondarily the largest swath of viewers) the most joy, so consider this a data point rather than an actual complaint. My "use case" for CtC might be rare.
I'm in a similar place. I think it's worth watching some of Simon's longer videos and working through them with him, meaning you try to make some progress for a reasonable amount of time, but when you get stuck, find the spot in the video where Simon can get you unstuck, then try to work the puzzle from there until you get stuck and repeat the above. It's time consuming and you may reasonably not have the time or energy to do that every time there is a longer video. But if you do it some of the time, it will help slowly but surely extend your capacity to solve more challenging puzzles. That's how I've made progress from not being able to solve any CtC videos to being able to solve the 30-60 minute puzzles more often than not and once in a (pretty rare) while, one of the 60+ minute puzzles.
One tip can be to at least watch Simon explaining the rules (helps a lot if they are not "standard" rules you know). Then just watch the first few minutes of his solve (in a 1h+ videos first five minutes is usually just pointing you in a direction, but it can point you in the right direction. I really enjoy the long videos, but I sometimes have to "save" them for the Week-End (or when I have time).
❤
No way I beat simon (time 58:06)
56:00 hate speech warning
Simon is JUST trolling us isn't he??? It is DRAMA everyday recently!!
7s in the row was today's "Peak moment of the day"...
But imagine having the region on left with two arrows... And 5 cells with one cell on both arrows meant it had to be minimum 16, which is what it could be... 79 was forced in the BLUE region all along!
If video length is the target metroc, the drama is just not worth it.
Or he's just a human and everyone sees things differently?
You have 74 comments on this channel, all of them negative. Why do you keep watching
55:54 for my time (not so relevant as I did have use of Simon's pointing out to the leftovers from row 3, after being stuck for too long at this point).
That was a nice puzzle, with a good flow to it.