the_cogito here, thanks so much for another feature! I loved Simon's solve, he actually found logic I didn't even know existed, more than once :P I want to shout out xenonetix for his help developing this puzzle. I actually made it months ago but decided at the time that the region logic in the bottom right was too hard and locked it in my puzzle vault for a while before coming back and making some changes before publishing :) This puzzle is most definitely difficult, absolutely 5/5, but I do think there were a small number of key eliminations that would have saved Simon a bit of headache. First, eliminating 5 from r5c7 with vault logic would have been really helpful I think, and also using that to deduce the value of the black-flashed 6/7. As always, a beautiful solve, and I'm very appreciative.
I'm not great at sudoku, but I loved watching Simon solve this. So fun (and beautiful!). I couldn't have ever solved this, but I was able to follow the logic so this was a fun watch. I can't even begin to understand how a mind can come up with something so brilliant! Great job!
@@williamnathanael412 Well, it's pretty well in line with what I'd found in my own solves and from watching other people solve. I think the deduction about the 5s specifically in row 6 was new to me though :P
Exciting to see a feature length puzzle, I have a rule about not doing any puzzles longer than an hour because that will turn into me spending 6 hours talking to myself like Simon does and my wife becomes rather concerned
there were a couple points where i was hollering at my screen over something simple that got missed for a long while (like taking the 5s out of the cells adjacent to the big vault) but the best-feeling deduction i made on my own was figuring out r2c6 a couple minutes before simon, because pink needed a 9 and there was nowhere else it could possibly go unless the region extended to that cell that said, i'm grateful to have these guided tours through complicated puzzles because i'm not really "a puzzler" myself and i would never be able to break in or do most of the big swings of logic needed to get through the meat of these. so following along somebody else gives me the chance to see the interesting stuff that's going on, and occasionally feel all smug and smart when i notice one pebble out of place while the rest of the mountain's been shoveled away for me, lmao
Yeah, at 32:00, Simon determines there's a 5 in the vault, but only removes one of the four 5s he has around that vault. The removal would have created a nice 89 pair in row 5. Argh!
Constantlly amazed at how patiently and good humoredly you work your way through these very difficult puzzles. Also constantly amazed at the super genius folks that construct these puzzles.
Oh my god, the 5s in row 6 of the big vault creating an 89 pair in row 5 drove me absolutely insane all video. I don't even know if it would resolve anything but I couldn't stop looking at it.
1:09:59 finish. I love how Simon places the 6 in yellow (upper yellow region), and asks what it does. He then proceeds to ignore the other half of the 6/7 pair two cells below it and looks clear across the other side of the puzzle. If he had just continued working off that 6, he would have been able to finish off with row/column sudoku (without having to look at the irregular sudoku) until the 3-9 pair deadly pattern at the end, resolved by the 3 in the upper purple region. Sadly, he did not get to see that nice little piece of logic at the end, but he always gets them done in the end (if the video makes it to publish, that is). 🤣 Another excellent puzzle full of unique logical paths!
Wow, your commentary on this video was particularly brilliant today Simon! How on earth can you even consider that 36:40 "this is the first time in a while on Cracking The Cryptic I think I have come up with something really really interesting"??? Every single video I watch of yours has lots of really really interesting logic interspersed at regular intervals!
Simon, I'm watching this several days after publication because, though I caught sight of it while I was on vacation, I knew I would not have 90 minutes to devote to it. I'm so glad I came back to it, though, as it was simply delightful to watch. I have said this before, but your region-defining skill is very impressive. I love watching you solve a difficult puzzle that is so much fun for you - thank you for this great video.
1:24:10 That's become what color again? I've recently played a lot of sudoku variants and it's really a lot of fun to see something that's even weirder still than some combination of reflection, thermo, arrow, chess, etc. It felt mind-blowing to see how other people thought of these challenges and open a new way to see and solve these puzzles
I have been watching all of the playlist where Simon makes the Phistomefel puzzles. I took myself in shouting at Simon in the first of them because his lvl of solving the puzzles have changed so much since then and he has become even better than before, and I were not use to see him missing some Logic before I see it. But it is amazin to see how much better he has gotten and how the difficulty of the puzzles have raised. Now I never schout at him because I know as Long as there is logic, we are not doing much sudoku 😉😄 and I have come to like that and I seldom see some Logic before him. 🤯 But the Phistomefel playlist journey is worth the time- if you got some houres to kill.💪👍
Amazing solve! One note: very early on you established that R6 had a five somewhere in the large box. That immediately eliminates the five touching it in R5 leaving an 89 pair in C6&7. That could have helped simplify some things later but you found a way around it. Again great solve!
@@dudebroguymate What I find irritiating is not that he misses it, but how. He did that logic with one of the four or so cells where it applied, and simply didn't do it for the rest, and never came back.
@@bibliopolist Yep. He eventually noticed the 5 pencil-marked in row 9, and eliminated the 5 in R5C6 by sudoku, but never R5C7. In the end (at 1:14:00), he simply got a triple elsewhere to determine it had to be 9 rather than 5. I found myself only staring at that one cell through most of the solve. :) The thing I found frustrating was that Simon mentioned (multiple times) that he needed to look at the vault to make sure no orthogonal cells are wrong, and then highlighted the vault, but then didn't actually check the surrounding cells. The same happened with the 5-cell vault on the bottom left where a 5 could be eliminated from R8C4. Sigh. :) After getting the 9 in R5C6, I then found myself fixated with column 9, where Simon had 8 digits but the black highlighting seemed to cause him to continually miss the last digit. And that last digit would have propagated through a significant part of the grid, too.
I'm not 100% sure about this, but I think you could have forced yellow into the bottom left much earlier by noticing how yellow needs to get both 1 and 2 somewhere, and it could only get one of those digits from the bottom row.
LOL, I don't think I've ever seen a Simon solve where he missed as much obvious stuff as I saw! He was doing it every few minutes. The most glaring omission was 5 in the vault ruling out 5 from three neighbouring cells.
Yes, I think there were at least 5 things at one point. The 3 on the bottom row since green couldn't get a 3 other than column 1 for some time. One of the trickier ones, but one he might have noticed if he colored the 67s like he thought about was row 5 column 8 needing to be a 5 since it saw black 67 and row 5 column 9 also saw black 67 so had to be the other one. That would have fixed the 89 pair he missed with vault logic, otherwise finished off the row, and gotten the value for the black 67s by sudoku. Then when he got the row going around the other way he didn't get the black 67s anyway. The region building would have been beyond me though!
Main one for me, around 40-43 minutes, is when trying to disprove the grey region entering through cell C6R6, he only had to notice it was the only possible cell for purple to come into the vault. I think he assumed that the cell just before, the lower cell of the 3 cell vault, was part of the giant vault. He has the Eureka moment at minute 53.
Every time I see small things like this that make me want to scream at my monitor, I have to take a step back and realize that the reason why I see these small things that Simon doesn't is because Simon sees the complicated logic required to solve these puzzles in the first place, and I don't 😅
Removing the colours of the completed regions would have helped to see the vaults, and especially this 5. But the fact is there were always other things going on in some other part of the puzzle, and nobody can see both the obvious stuff and the more difficult and general logic at the same time.
Again, just incredible from the_cogito and Simon!! Beautiful run of puzzles continues. The region building was absolutely beautiful, and a very cool novel ruleset as well. I was waiting on Simon to take the 5 out of r5c7 bc vault logic for the longest dang time though 😂 still very good solve, I never would’ve attempted this
I was proud to see that 5 and waited a long time for Simon to do the vault logic. He hovered it many times while talking about vault logic and eventually found another way to prove the digit.
I did this the day before your video and loved the pacing changes in the puzzle. For a while, at the start, I thought it was more like an easy 3 star difficulty, before it dug its heels in. A wonderful ruleset from Xenonetix and a beautifully executed puzzle using it from Cogito.
I kept waiting for him to spot it!!! Especially after he said he was gonna go check orthogonally touching digits like 3 times. At about an hour I finally figured he was never going to see it and he'd end up immediately placing the digit after he eliminated all the other options. Within a couple minutes, sure enough he had.
This was really cool to solve. Chaos construction is basically my favorite form of variant, and this was a fun ruleset. I'm proud of myself for completing it.
Just watched Bremster’s reaction video to Simon’s Grid Dance solve. I learned that you could watch youtube videos at 1.25 x speed (or faster). After using youtube for 20 years or so, I just find this out now! 😃
37:27 After determining that the black cells, top and left edges of the large vault, all had to be different regions and extending the red and orange regions as required (1 more space to the right) the question I then focused on was "Where does the yellow region get 1 AND 2 from?" It can't take both the cells from the vault in the bottom right corner, it can't have 1 nor 2 in the bottom row unless it takes a cell from that vault and the only other place it can access that can have a 1 or 2 is R8C1. Which made working out the red, orange and pink/purple regions easier.
Brilliant puzzle and great solve once again! A little help with the question at 46:32 how to prove that purple needs to connect in the big vault: You have to connect 7 regions of 9 cells to the big vault. There are only 9 regions of 9 cells in a sudoku. So only 2 regions don't connect to the big vault, and those are green and blue (as proven earlier).
Just started watching these videos a few weeks ago. I spend much of the time going "what...huh?... how?" and then once in a while getting very agitated shouting "the 7.. the 7" at the screen. :-) lol.. great fun.
What a belter, I love the ones you look at and think, dont have a clue, then slowly and surely they reveal themselves through mico pieces of logic, fantastic
Simon beautiful as all time, but still classic simon: 1. Dont remove colors or flashes make it harder to spot things, the mentioned volt logic and that the Black Flash is a 7 2. Dont Use the logic that the volt has 7 regions and the 2 missing are Green and Blue, mean every Else region has to visit the volt But Simon is Simon and stays Simon 👍👏
As soon as you put a 5 in the big vault you could have knocked 5 out of r5c6 and r5c7 making them an 89 pair Generally lots of missing the vault adjacency rule. Might have been easier to remove the colours from finished regions so you could see the vaults better.
The 589 touching the vault with a 5 in it for 75% of the video was killing me. And then he deleted the corner marks without deleting the 5 center mark. This is when I officially died.
1:06:30 "We might have to go full out coloring things like 1s and 2s" - what I did here is to use the letter-pencilmarks (A and B in the corners) to distinguish the two kinds of 1s and 2s, as the colors were already taken up by the boxes. 1:15:05 "So that in the top [C6R12] is a 39 pair ... which might be important." - As the yellow region already has 3 and 9, this 39 pair makes sure that the yellow region can't reach further left, which fixes the yellow region completely. The pink region also has already a 3, so only one of the two cells can be pink, the other one thus must be blue (as green can't reach it). [and of course Simon sees this too, 3 minutes later.]
I found this one extremely tricky, even at the beginning I found myself second guessing everything, with digits being able to repeat within a ‘vault’ making things especially difficult for pencil marking! Need to do a simple domino one to rest my brain now!
Nah those are two different situation. One single cell with 5 pencilmark is basically useless; Four cells with 5 pencilmark is obe cell away from being restrictive
32:30 spends 30+ seconds saying “I don’t see how that helps any further” when his mouse cursor is literally on the cell/domino he needs to do next. 🤣🤣🤣 I swear he does it on purpose so some of us mere mortals who could NEVER do this puzzle on their own can feel smart for a few minutes. Thanks, Simon!
The moment Simon says “this has to be seven based on our previously logic” when the six had been staring at it for 20 minutes…. I wanted to throw my phone across the room xD
I was going crazy ever since he discovered that 7 colors need to go in and if blue green doesn't go in then why is he thinking about if purple has room outside the vault ! it has to go in! I could never get this far but it amazes me how he misses the obvious and finds the hard logic.
Haven’t finished but I’m waiting for him to make the at conclusion as well. @53:35 The first time I think I’ve ever not been pleased when he finally makes the deduction; and it’s because I was too anxious from how long it was 😅 Edit for clarity: this is meant with genuine respect for how amazing Simon’s logical deductions are; I had genuinely started to question whether I was wrong about that deduction and couldn’t work out how else it could work.
In a livestream the other day, Simon made a point of being in logic mode vs sudoku mode (scanning), and as a viewer most of the time I’m in sudoku mode, as my brain has no logical stress on it. That often leads to me getting frustrated by Simon missing simple sudoku steps, however, in this puzzle, there was 0 frustration, because my brain didn’t even make an attempt at the logic, and there was barely any sudoku, which is incredible for a SUDOKU puzzle. My point is, well done the_cogito for making me not want to murder Simon because he doesn’t see the simple things
Around the 24:00 mark, another way to look at it is: If blue went across to column 8, below blue you would have 5 regions (gray, purple, orange, red, yellow) which need 45 cells. There are only 40 cells available below blue (not including R5C9), so at least 5 cells belonging to these regions would have to squirt out up column 9. But none of these 5 regions can reach that far with only 9 cells.
Another incredibly clever puzzle. I had a feeling I might cave in on this one, but I managed to work my way through it once I'd drummed into my thick skull that numbers could repeat in vaults.
23:55 Another way to look at this (basically the inverse of "how do you fill the top" but for me more immediately intuitive) is any possible arrangement of blue that reaches the big vault forces grey, purple, orange, red, and yellow to stay entirely in the bottom five rows, which means you have 5 rows of 9 cells that must be take up by 5 groups of 9 plus at least one blue poking down in to the big vault and at least the three greens already in those 5 rows, which is fatally overcrowded
Through many fits and starts and getting the exclusionary vault rule bass-ackward several times over in my mind, despite all of this beating Simon's time by just a few scant minutes, but acknowledging that I was explaining the puzzle to no one other than myself as I fumbled along. I think I'm retiring now while I'm only this far behind :)
39:35 The 5th "Boom" between R6C7 and R6C8 is wrong in my opinion. Simon correctly pauses a moment for the next "Boom", so why did he not pause on this one? Easily, R6C7 and R6C8 could be the same color (yes, I see that they eventually turned out to be different), but not following the logic at this point in time. He got lucky one more time :)
At 39:30, how did he justify putting a region-separator line between Row 6 Column 7, and Row 6 Column 8? I know it turned out to be correct, but I don't see the logic that allows that, at that juncture. Row 6 Column 8 isn't an exit-cell for the vault so why does it have to be a different region from Row 6 Column 7?
I can't see any justification for it, although there does need to be a dividing line either there or on row 5/6 column 8 to keep the exit cells separate
I think that was a small mistake. Straight after he hesitated about putting a divider horizontally between r5 and r6 in c8 too. "I don't think that's a valid 'bumm' - no". I thought once he spotted that he might have realised the same applied vertically, but no.
As much as I love watching someone *far* better than I at puzzles solve stuff I wouldn't even be able to start, it always bugs me a little when Simon says things like how he can't see the cages anymore. Well, if he'd just remove colors for regions he's already completed and outlined, I'm sure it would be easier to see, but the man just can't live without his coloring. lol
1:16:22 1 is questioning why it has to be Mr. Pink. It says Mr. Orange has a cool sounding color, why can't it be Mr. Orange? Lol great job solving this, Simon!
45:00 If grey goes into r6c6, then purple can't enter the vault. Since blue and green also can't enter the vault, you have 3 regions missing the vault. This is a contradiction since we know 7 regions enter the vault. (Blue can't enter the vault because of the number of squares that are needed to complete the bottom regions.)
While you did miss that 5 for a while, I think you can blame it on the vaults being kinda hard to see :) More importantly, that logic with the 7 black entrances to the bottom right was pure brilliance on your part. Well deduced!
Around 45:20, isn't just the case that if gray takes R6C6 there is no way for purple to reach the vault? But as already observed it must reach the vault!
Completed this one on my own in 128:34! Very fun puzzle, even though I got stuck for quite a while on not realising that the 5-cell vault in the bottom left corner couldn't have a 4 in it. Puzzle seemed to solve rather quickly after I noticed that :D
i think simon got a bit overwhelmed with visual noise here and missed some quick deductions, especially when he started mixing up colors at the end. I think that r2c6 deduction was available a few min before simon arrived at it but he still got there. A great solve all around
Was I the only one breathing a sigh of relief at 1:00:20 when he finally cleaned up those 5's? (I probably have the least amount of sudoku skill of anyone watching this, so I am *not* criticizing. This man is a genius!)
Simon, you would have had it so much faster if you took the 5 out of the bordering digits to the cage on the big cage! It sat there as you said "let me check the cage magic again" like 4 times! So many things to look at on this one, though, tough puzzle. Awesome job! haha
R7C9 sat as the only undetermined cell in C9 for minutes at the end - should have been resolved as the 6 went into C9. Simon - I believe the black flashes are disrupting your scanning!
Simon kept proving and reproving the same things. He proved that purple and grey both had to enter the big vault because there weren't enough regions left but then spent what felt like ten minutes trying check if purple could avoid entering the big vault. In doing so he proved that the entries were different colours about five times too
Simon, I think you may have missed that once you had discovered that the big vault had 7 different colours on the North and West border, the 4 bottom lines (yellow red, orange and purple) did miss 3 cells to complete the 4 regions: 2 cells on the left taken by green and on cell taken by on of the other colour entering the big vault (in r5c7) Once that was given, it was quite obvious that r5c4, r5c5 and r5c6 had to be used to fill in for the 3 missing cells and the bottom regions the could draw almost automatically.
77:28 for me. Ok this one almost drove me nuts. I had to check the ruleset like three different times because I just couldn’t believe the puzzle would have a solution. Definitely the most insane sudoku I have ever solved by far.
I think going so long and being close to the end started getting to you as 1:24:10 That’s a very pink orange :P (Great solve, btw. I’m glad I can watch someone solve these as I wouldn’t even know how to start, little alone finish it!)
Was this a mistake? At 39:35 when he's separating all the "exit" cells from the big vault, he puts a line between r6c7 and r6c8. But those two cells could connect, couldn't they? It only matters that each exit cell is different.
It's easier to prove that blue can't hit the large vault. If you make it leave the maximum space below it, by extending it to C9 then dipping down, there are still only 41 cells below it, for five trapped 9-cell regions, and you need at least 6 regions to touch the vault, so at least one more region must hit the vault. If you try to bring blue down earlier, to leave an escape up the right hand side, none of the previously trapped regions can reach the exit. This means you can rule 8 out of the vault, because at least two regions can't get into it. You missed that, as soon as 5 was placed in the pentomino, it had to go into the vault in R6. It can't go in green, because it touches the pentomino. It can't go in purple, because it would repeat. When you eventually spotted this, your mouse was pointing at a pair of 589s touching the vault on the outside, whilst saying it did nothing. Wakey, wakey! You've said 5 can't go next to the vault. Why can you not see that grey could never go next to orange on the edge of the large vault? If it did, how does purple, which you'd already shown also touch one of the border cells, get out in order to do this? I think part of your problem, particularly towards the end, was that you were just asking the wrong questions at the wrong time. You could have asked where 2 goes in grey much earlier, and you could have asked where purple gets its 9, and you'd have quickly finished it. I found it easier to delete the colour from all completed regions. This not only let me see the vaults, it also made it obvious which regions were incomplete, and let me use colouring to identify other things, such as which 12 was which, without resorting to flashing colours, which is almost always messy and confusing. It's bad enough for those of us who are colour-blind, without you calling a purple 2 "orange". Purple is just about the least orange colour there is! There isn't even a colour you could call orangey purple, or purpley orange. Are you trying to shake our chromatic confidence even more? There were other similarly weirdly misnamed colours in this. You called blue "green", which was particularly confusing, because that cell could be either blue or green and your deduction made no sense. This was certainly a hard one, deserving its 5/5 rating, but possibly not a 10/10 rating. I thoroughly enjoyed it, some hard puzzles seem more like torture, but this was more like a voyage of discovery. The idea that the large vault needed 7 regions to enter it, yet also need to fill the huge empty expanse at the top was worrying for a while.
After two hours yesterday I broke the puzzle. Restarted today, sprinting through the first deductions on the left side of the grid and knowing that the big vault had to have seven regions, it still took an hour and a half to solve!
@43:58 The easy way to see that r6c6 isn't grey is just to note that because blue and green don't get into the vault, and 7 regions must get into the vault, purple must get into the vault and making r6c6 grey cuts off purple's access to the vault
Great solve! Based on your channel's thumbnail, you should really give a game called "Monument Valley" a stream, I think you both would really enjoy it. Cheers
A much easier way to see the blue not being in the big vault is that if blue is in the big vault, then you have to fit the lower 5 regions, requiring 45 cells in total, into the bottom five rows excluding the four cells being removed for the green and the blue, so 41 cells at most, making it impossible, even if there is an escape route for one, because none can reach it.
42:35 When trying to figure out how grey gets into the vault after determining that purple must also get into the vault, wouldn't that rule out all possibilities of grey blocking off purple?
1:21:18, while the mouse is hovering over the 9 which can only be in r2c6 in purple: "This is probably gonna be about some weird digit that can only go in one place in one of the regions, I wonder what that digit is"
man it was really frustrating that he said early on that blue couldn't get into the vault, so purple and grey had to be in the vault, but each time he was trying to prove where grey went he kept ignoring the fact that grey was blocking off purple.
@1:13:50 Wow, Simon, I'm not sure you're supposed to do that [Cute though] lol. That 5 pencil-mark [in r6c7] can't be adjacent to that "vault" ["vault logic" it has a 5] , so that was an 8-9 pair to start with [in r5c6&7] fixing something else already. [[The "7" in r5c3]] Cute though [It solved onward from before here -- straining though -- but fun] [Among other things, I noticed that "1" in r3c6, had to be PURPLE -- because the others all had their 1s ] CUTE THOUGH LOL 😂😎👍☕☕🥃🥃
Oh, I'm not explaining Green needs a 2. [And it has to find it in r1c3 -- nine cells away by chance , completing it] And green already has a 1 [I'm not sure if it's in these pencil marks though] [[Edit: YES, the "1" is there in "green." ]] [[And the "1" in r2c2 is blue -- or it would be isolated]]
I don't get why I find puzzle like this easy and then a simple killer sudoku can destroy me... This took me 25 min and killer from yesterday took me 1.5h lol
Simon is very very good at mental arithmetic but isn't quite as strong in these geometric/visual style puzzles. For example starting at around 20 minutes he spends some time trying to work out if the blue box can get inside the large vault in the bottom right but it's pretty clear you can't do it without cutting off the other colours below. He's sort of like a robot in that sense he needs to "prove" it can't be done which means going through every single option and rule them all out individually. You probably looked at it for 10 seconds and realised it wasn't possible and moved on.
the_cogito here, thanks so much for another feature! I loved Simon's solve, he actually found logic I didn't even know existed, more than once :P
I want to shout out xenonetix for his help developing this puzzle. I actually made it months ago but decided at the time that the region logic in the bottom right was too hard and locked it in my puzzle vault for a while before coming back and making some changes before publishing :)
This puzzle is most definitely difficult, absolutely 5/5, but I do think there were a small number of key eliminations that would have saved Simon a bit of headache. First, eliminating 5 from r5c7 with vault logic would have been really helpful I think, and also using that to deduce the value of the black-flashed 6/7. As always, a beautiful solve, and I'm very appreciative.
I absolutely loved the logic, please do more puzzles like this :D
Thanks for the puzzle. It saved me from having to do yard work in sweltering heat!
I'm not great at sudoku, but I loved watching Simon solve this. So fun (and beautiful!). I couldn't have ever solved this, but I was able to follow the logic so this was a fun watch. I can't even begin to understand how a mind can come up with something so brilliant! Great job!
40:00 is that the way?
@@williamnathanael412 Well, it's pretty well in line with what I'd found in my own solves and from watching other people solve. I think the deduction about the 5s specifically in row 6 was new to me though :P
Exciting to see a feature length puzzle, I have a rule about not doing any puzzles longer than an hour because that will turn into me spending 6 hours talking to myself like Simon does and my wife becomes rather concerned
On the other hand, she should be happy you're staying out of trouble. 🙂
Your comment is a reminder that I've never had an original experience
@@ButcherBB That just depends on how you define original
My rule is, under 30 min vid, I just do it. Up to an hour I can solve it with a couple of hints from the video, and over an hour I grab the popcorn. 😂
Anything Simon takes 40 minutes or less I try. Beyond that, I rarely find success.
there were a couple points where i was hollering at my screen over something simple that got missed for a long while (like taking the 5s out of the cells adjacent to the big vault) but the best-feeling deduction i made on my own was figuring out r2c6 a couple minutes before simon, because pink needed a 9 and there was nowhere else it could possibly go unless the region extended to that cell
that said, i'm grateful to have these guided tours through complicated puzzles because i'm not really "a puzzler" myself and i would never be able to break in or do most of the big swings of logic needed to get through the meat of these. so following along somebody else gives me the chance to see the interesting stuff that's going on, and occasionally feel all smug and smart when i notice one pebble out of place while the rest of the mountain's been shoveled away for me, lmao
Yeah, at 32:00, Simon determines there's a 5 in the vault, but only removes one of the four 5s he has around that vault. The removal would have created a nice 89 pair in row 5. Argh!
This is such a mood xD
Simon: Every color besides blue and green has to go into the big vault
Also Simon: Do we know for sure purple has to go into the vault?
Haha, exactly this, he mentioned it several times, but then frequently stated 'purple could take all the bottom left cells'. 😂
And then -finally- figured out at 53:30 that he was missing that bit!
that's exactly what Iwas shouting at him the whole time 😂
Constantlly amazed at how patiently and good humoredly you work your way through these very difficult puzzles. Also constantly amazed at the super genius folks that construct these puzzles.
Oh my god, the 5s in row 6 of the big vault creating an 89 pair in row 5 drove me absolutely insane all video. I don't even know if it would resolve anything but I couldn't stop looking at it.
I went to check what you said. Man, that drove me insane too. Hahahaha.
1:09:59 finish. I love how Simon places the 6 in yellow (upper yellow region), and asks what it does. He then proceeds to ignore the other half of the 6/7 pair two cells below it and looks clear across the other side of the puzzle. If he had just continued working off that 6, he would have been able to finish off with row/column sudoku (without having to look at the irregular sudoku) until the 3-9 pair deadly pattern at the end, resolved by the 3 in the upper purple region. Sadly, he did not get to see that nice little piece of logic at the end, but he always gets them done in the end (if the video makes it to publish, that is). 🤣
Another excellent puzzle full of unique logical paths!
Wow, your commentary on this video was particularly brilliant today Simon! How on earth can you even consider that 36:40 "this is the first time in a while on Cracking The Cryptic I think I have come up with something really really interesting"??? Every single video I watch of yours has lots of really really interesting logic interspersed at regular intervals!
agreed!
Simon, I'm watching this several days after publication because, though I caught sight of it while I was on vacation, I knew I would not have 90 minutes to devote to it. I'm so glad I came back to it, though, as it was simply delightful to watch. I have said this before, but your region-defining skill is very impressive. I love watching you solve a difficult puzzle that is so much fun for you - thank you for this great video.
Rules: 03:31
Let's Get Cracking: 05:38
Simon's time: 1h20m45s
Puzzle Solved: 1:26:23
What about this video's Top Tier Simarkisms?!
Bobbins: 1x (1:17:12)
Scooby-Doo: 1x (59:10)
And how about this video's Simarkisms?!
Ah: 30x (07:18, 09:41, 09:44, 10:35, 13:55, 18:37, 28:10, 28:10, 32:52, 46:54, 49:04, 49:36, 49:37, 52:17, 52:17, 52:22, 53:27, 53:28, 54:41, 55:50, 1:02:24, 1:04:30, 1:08:42, 1:11:16, 1:12:48, 1:15:48, 1:16:53, 1:20:35, 1:22:06, 1:24:09)
Clever: 10x (25:05, 49:13, 55:41, 55:44, 1:12:28, 1:23:18, 1:24:30, 1:26:32, 1:27:11, 1:27:33)
Obviously: 9x (01:18, 03:50, 11:34, 13:01, 16:24, 19:31, 28:27, 59:29, 1:27:27)
In Fact: 8x (09:37, 12:19, 13:24, 14:09, 15:22, 17:27, 29:49, 42:50)
By Sudoku: 6x (10:47, 1:02:46, 1:06:05, 1:10:41, 1:19:05, 1:21:51)
Pencil Mark/mark: 6x (08:21, 08:31, 59:24, 59:25, 1:02:17, 1:22:27)
Good Grief: 5x (25:39, 1:09:42, 1:20:05, 1:23:53, 1:24:09)
Hang On: 5x (44:34, 44:34, 49:00, 49:28, 1:19:22)
Progress: 5x (32:56, 33:44, 1:06:22, 1:09:12, 1:16:02)
The Answer is: 4x (26:27, 28:27, 29:03, 31:49)
Beautiful: 4x (55:28, 1:02:37, 1:17:59, 1:18:01)
Nonsense: 3x (21:02, 23:34, 43:27)
Wow: 3x (1:05:58, 1:08:50, 1:10:05)
What on Earth: 2x (20:34, 23:03)
Goodness: 2x (49:13, 54:22)
What a Puzzle: 2x (1:17:19, 1:17:19)
Sorry: 2x (32:43, 1:12:25)
Naked Single: 2x (1:13:09, 1:13:12)
Lovely: 2x (01:42, 54:22)
Brilliant: 2x (01:51, 02:50)
Epiphany: 2x (1:24:41, 1:27:01)
Disappointing: 2x (1:07:23, 1:07:26)
Corollary: 2x (04:35, 16:24)
What Does This Mean?: 2x (57:39, 59:07)
Cake!: 2x (01:18, 02:04)
Extraordinary: 1x (00:44)
Come on Simon: 1x (1:22:48)
Masterpiece: 1x (03:33)
We Can Do Better Than That: 1x (13:24)
Let's Take Stock: 1x (1:25:54)
Most popular number(>9), digit and colour this video:
Ten (3 mentions)
Five (107 mentions)
Purple (57 mentions)
Antithesis Battles:
Even (2) - Odd (0)
Outside (2) - Inside (1)
Black (6) - White (0)
Row (27) - Column (11)
FAQ:
Q1: You missed something!
A1: That could very well be the case! Human speech can be hard to understand for computers like me! Point out the ones that I missed and maybe I'll learn!
Q2: Can you do this for another channel?
A2: I've been thinking about that and wrote some code to make that possible. Let me know which channel you think would be a good fit!
1:14:00 By weirdness
Here's something for you to start tracking 54:23
Man Talk channel would seem highly suited for this kind of thing. "Sweetie", "Chad", "Proper garden tool", etc.
Purple should be even higher, except Mark called it pink loads of times and orange once !!!!
@@janerobson2297 Simon using 'pink' instead of 'purple' instead of 'pink' is a first in 2 years plus of watching every one of his solves!
1:24:10 That's become what color again?
I've recently played a lot of sudoku variants and it's really a lot of fun to see something that's even weirder still than some combination of reflection, thermo, arrow, chess, etc. It felt mind-blowing to see how other people thought of these challenges and open a new way to see and solve these puzzles
And here we are, wondering whether to call it pink or purple. Simon finds a novel solution and calls it orange. 😂
This took me over 2,5hrs, but it felt so much shorter because of how engaged I was. Brilliant! Loved it!
I have been watching all of the playlist where Simon makes the Phistomefel puzzles. I took myself in shouting at Simon in the first of them because his lvl of solving the puzzles have changed so much since then and he has become even better than before, and I were not use to see him missing some Logic before I see it. But it is amazin to see how much better he has gotten and how the difficulty of the puzzles have raised. Now I never schout at him because I know as Long as there is logic, we are not doing much sudoku 😉😄 and I have come to like that and I seldom see some Logic before him. 🤯 But the Phistomefel playlist journey is worth the time- if you got some houres to kill.💪👍
Amazing solve!
One note: very early on you established that R6 had a five somewhere in the large box. That immediately eliminates the five touching it in R5 leaving an 89 pair in C6&7. That could have helped simplify some things later but you found a way around it.
Again great solve!
Yes, so frustrating that he missed this. Unfortunately, he often misses quite obvious stuff.
@@dudebroguymate What I find irritiating is not that he misses it, but how. He did that logic with one of the four or so cells where it applied, and simply didn't do it for the rest, and never came back.
@@bibliopolist Yep. He eventually noticed the 5 pencil-marked in row 9, and eliminated the 5 in R5C6 by sudoku, but never R5C7. In the end (at 1:14:00), he simply got a triple elsewhere to determine it had to be 9 rather than 5. I found myself only staring at that one cell through most of the solve. :)
The thing I found frustrating was that Simon mentioned (multiple times) that he needed to look at the vault to make sure no orthogonal cells are wrong, and then highlighted the vault, but then didn't actually check the surrounding cells. The same happened with the 5-cell vault on the bottom left where a 5 could be eliminated from R8C4. Sigh. :)
After getting the 9 in R5C6, I then found myself fixated with column 9, where Simon had 8 digits but the black highlighting seemed to cause him to continually miss the last digit. And that last digit would have propagated through a significant part of the grid, too.
I'm not 100% sure about this, but I think you could have forced yellow into the bottom left much earlier by noticing how yellow needs to get both 1 and 2 somewhere, and it could only get one of those digits from the bottom row.
Very nice 👍
LOL, I don't think I've ever seen a Simon solve where he missed as much obvious stuff as I saw! He was doing it every few minutes. The most glaring omission was 5 in the vault ruling out 5 from three neighbouring cells.
Dude I was screaming i think had he realized those the video would be like 45 minutes shorter. Not that its a bad thing but they were so obvious>:/
Yes, I think there were at least 5 things at one point. The 3 on the bottom row since green couldn't get a 3 other than column 1 for some time. One of the trickier ones, but one he might have noticed if he colored the 67s like he thought about was row 5 column 8 needing to be a 5 since it saw black 67 and row 5 column 9 also saw black 67 so had to be the other one. That would have fixed the 89 pair he missed with vault logic, otherwise finished off the row, and gotten the value for the black 67s by sudoku. Then when he got the row going around the other way he didn't get the black 67s anyway.
The region building would have been beyond me though!
Main one for me, around 40-43 minutes, is when trying to disprove the grey region entering through cell C6R6, he only had to notice it was the only possible cell for purple to come into the vault. I think he assumed that the cell just before, the lower cell of the 3 cell vault, was part of the giant vault. He has the Eureka moment at minute 53.
Every time I see small things like this that make me want to scream at my monitor, I have to take a step back and realize that the reason why I see these small things that Simon doesn't is because Simon sees the complicated logic required to solve these puzzles in the first place, and I don't 😅
Removing the colours of the completed regions would have helped to see the vaults, and especially this 5. But the fact is there were always other things going on in some other part of the puzzle, and nobody can see both the obvious stuff and the more difficult and general logic at the same time.
"Do have a go"
No thank you, not this time
Got my popcorn, got my cold drink - thankful for a feature length puzzle to wind down the day - also extremely thankful for air conditioning!!!
Again, just incredible from the_cogito and Simon!! Beautiful run of puzzles continues. The region building was absolutely beautiful, and a very cool novel ruleset as well. I was waiting on Simon to take the 5 out of r5c7 bc vault logic for the longest dang time though 😂 still very good solve, I never would’ve attempted this
That 5! It was such an eyesore! But Simon found all that beautiful logic so quickly though. :)
I was proud to see that 5 and waited a long time for Simon to do the vault logic. He hovered it many times while talking about vault logic and eventually found another way to prove the digit.
Oh the fives! I can't focus on Simon's brilliant solving while staring at r5c3 and r5c7.
I did this the day before your video and loved the pacing changes in the puzzle. For a while, at the start, I thought it was more like an easy 3 star difficulty, before it dug its heels in. A wonderful ruleset from Xenonetix and a beautifully executed puzzle using it from Cogito.
32:45 “im not spotting what this is doing” with his cursor on the exact cell affected by what he just did….. classic Simon. We love you :)
I kept waiting for him to spot it!!! Especially after he said he was gonna go check orthogonally touching digits like 3 times. At about an hour I finally figured he was never going to see it and he'd end up immediately placing the digit after he eliminated all the other options. Within a couple minutes, sure enough he had.
When he finally resolves it by "weirdness" :')
This was really cool to solve. Chaos construction is basically my favorite form of variant, and this was a fun ruleset. I'm proud of myself for completing it.
Simon, you are delightful. I love watching you work.
Just watched Bremster’s reaction video to Simon’s Grid Dance solve. I learned that you could watch youtube videos at 1.25 x speed (or faster). After using youtube for 20 years or so, I just find this out now! 😃
37:27 After determining that the black cells, top and left edges of the large vault, all had to be different regions and extending the red and orange regions as required (1 more space to the right) the question I then focused on was "Where does the yellow region get 1 AND 2 from?" It can't take both the cells from the vault in the bottom right corner, it can't have 1 nor 2 in the bottom row unless it takes a cell from that vault and the only other place it can access that can have a 1 or 2 is R8C1. Which made working out the red, orange and pink/purple regions easier.
Brilliant puzzle and great solve once again! A little help with the question at 46:32 how to prove that purple needs to connect in the big vault: You have to connect 7 regions of 9 cells to the big vault. There are only 9 regions of 9 cells in a sudoku. So only 2 regions don't connect to the big vault, and those are green and blue (as proven earlier).
Just started watching these videos a few weeks ago. I spend much of the time going "what...huh?... how?" and then once in a while getting very agitated shouting "the 7.. the 7" at the screen. :-) lol.. great fun.
What a belter, I love the ones you look at and think, dont have a clue, then slowly and surely they reveal themselves through mico pieces of logic, fantastic
Simon beautiful as all time, but still classic simon:
1. Dont remove colors or flashes make it harder to spot things, the mentioned volt logic and that the Black Flash is a 7
2. Dont Use the logic that the volt has 7 regions and the 2 missing are Green and Blue, mean every Else region has to visit the volt
But Simon is Simon and stays Simon 👍👏
As soon as you put a 5 in the big vault you could have knocked 5 out of r5c6 and r5c7 making them an 89 pair
Generally lots of missing the vault adjacency rule. Might have been easier to remove the colours from finished regions so you could see the vaults better.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought decoloring completed regions would have helped him see things better. :)
I was waiting for him to see that for 20 minutes and then he goes and solves it by sudoku instead
@@MrBasmannen Yes, he does this often and it's always quite annoying, because we then don't ever get to see the constructor's intended solve path.
@@MrBasmannen 20 mins?
He should have worked out it was an 89 pair at 32:03
Finally at 1:13:45 he fills it in.
The 589 touching the vault with a 5 in it for 75% of the video was killing me. And then he deleted the corner marks without deleting the 5 center mark. This is when I officially died.
1:06:30 "We might have to go full out coloring things like 1s and 2s" - what I did here is to use the letter-pencilmarks (A and B in the corners) to distinguish the two kinds of 1s and 2s, as the colors were already taken up by the boxes.
1:15:05 "So that in the top [C6R12] is a 39 pair ... which might be important." - As the yellow region already has 3 and 9, this 39 pair makes sure that the yellow region can't reach further left, which fixes the yellow region completely. The pink region also has already a 3, so only one of the two cells can be pink, the other one thus must be blue (as green can't reach it). [and of course Simon sees this too, 3 minutes later.]
I found this one extremely tricky, even at the beginning I found myself second guessing everything, with digits being able to repeat within a ‘vault’ making things especially difficult for pencil marking! Need to do a simple domino one to rest my brain now!
08:35 Not prepared to pencilmark five possible digits for a cell
11:05 Now I'm prepared
Nah those are two different situation.
One single cell with 5 pencilmark is basically useless;
Four cells with 5 pencilmark is obe cell away from being restrictive
32:30 spends 30+ seconds saying “I don’t see how that helps any further” when his mouse cursor is literally on the cell/domino he needs to do next. 🤣🤣🤣
I swear he does it on purpose so some of us mere mortals who could NEVER do this puzzle on their own can feel smart for a few minutes. Thanks, Simon!
The moment Simon says “this has to be seven based on our previously logic” when the six had been staring at it for 20 minutes…. I wanted to throw my phone across the room xD
I was going crazy ever since he discovered that 7 colors need to go in and if blue green doesn't go in then why is he thinking about if purple has room outside the vault ! it has to go in! I could never get this far but it amazes me how he misses the obvious and finds the hard logic.
Haven’t finished but I’m waiting for him to make the at conclusion as well.
@53:35
The first time I think I’ve ever not been pleased when he finally makes the deduction; and it’s because I was too anxious from how long it was 😅
Edit for clarity: this is meant with genuine respect for how amazing Simon’s logical deductions are; I had genuinely started to question whether I was wrong about that deduction and couldn’t work out how else it could work.
Exactly what I was thinking. This is the first time I've ever been quicker solving something than Simon.
This took me about two and a half hours to finish, but I managed to. That's the first of the hard hard puzzles I completed, so I'm happy about that.
In inability of both of his pencilmarks in R5C3 and R5C7 from being 5s was staring at him for quite a long time 😂
Incredible puzzle, incredible Simon
In a livestream the other day, Simon made a point of being in logic mode vs sudoku mode (scanning), and as a viewer most of the time I’m in sudoku mode, as my brain has no logical stress on it. That often leads to me getting frustrated by Simon missing simple sudoku steps, however, in this puzzle, there was 0 frustration, because my brain didn’t even make an attempt at the logic, and there was barely any sudoku, which is incredible for a SUDOKU puzzle. My point is, well done the_cogito for making me not want to murder Simon because he doesn’t see the simple things
Around the 24:00 mark, another way to look at it is: If blue went across to column 8, below blue you would have 5 regions (gray, purple, orange, red, yellow) which need 45 cells. There are only 40 cells available below blue (not including R5C9), so at least 5 cells belonging to these regions would have to squirt out up column 9. But none of these 5 regions can reach that far with only 9 cells.
53:58 finally xD. I was screaming at my screen because he didn’t see that for such a long time 😂
Awesom solve! Thank you
"Now the 9 in this row has to be here; by weirdness" 🤣
Another incredibly clever puzzle. I had a feeling I might cave in on this one, but I managed to work my way through it once I'd drummed into my thick skull that numbers could repeat in vaults.
23:55 Another way to look at this (basically the inverse of "how do you fill the top" but for me more immediately intuitive) is any possible arrangement of blue that reaches the big vault forces grey, purple, orange, red, and yellow to stay entirely in the bottom five rows, which means you have 5 rows of 9 cells that must be take up by 5 groups of 9 plus at least one blue poking down in to the big vault and at least the three greens already in those 5 rows, which is fatally overcrowded
I had the same idea, was surprised Simon thought about it a bit differently
The "There must be 7 regions in the big vault" thing made sense to me almost absolutely as you posited the vault's 467 triple.
Mad 2.5 hrs solve here. That was COOL!
48:10 I have been frantically waving at my monitor for like 20 minutes on this point 😀
Thanks Simon for the triplet birthday shout out!
Through many fits and starts and getting the exclusionary vault rule bass-ackward several times over in my mind, despite all of this beating Simon's time by just a few scant minutes, but acknowledging that I was explaining the puzzle to no one other than myself as I fumbled along. I think I'm retiring now while I'm only this far behind :)
39:35 The 5th "Boom" between R6C7 and R6C8 is wrong in my opinion. Simon correctly pauses a moment for the next "Boom", so why did he not pause on this one? Easily, R6C7 and R6C8 could be the same color (yes, I see that they eventually turned out to be different), but not following the logic at this point in time. He got lucky one more time :)
I thought the same thing
At 39:30, how did he justify putting a region-separator line between Row 6 Column 7, and Row 6 Column 8? I know it turned out to be correct, but I don't see the logic that allows that, at that juncture. Row 6 Column 8 isn't an exit-cell for the vault so why does it have to be a different region from Row 6 Column 7?
I can't see any justification for it, although there does need to be a dividing line either there or on row 5/6 column 8 to keep the exit cells separate
I think that was a small mistake.
Straight after he hesitated about putting a divider horizontally between r5 and r6 in c8 too. "I don't think that's a valid 'bumm' - no". I thought once he spotted that he might have realised the same applied vertically, but no.
Nice to see Simon overwhelming in this one. Said blue to green and orange to purple twice or thrice.
This took me 112 minutes.... these chaos construction puzzles are tough as nails but extremely satisfying to solve.
As much as I love watching someone *far* better than I at puzzles solve stuff I wouldn't even be able to start, it always bugs me a little when Simon says things like how he can't see the cages anymore. Well, if he'd just remove colors for regions he's already completed and outlined, I'm sure it would be easier to see, but the man just can't live without his coloring. lol
I was wondering why he couldn't put a green edge on the vaults instead of the regions.
54:06 Thank you Simon 😅
It was a long, meandering path, and I lost my way a couple of times and had to backtrack, so it took me a long time, but I really enjoyed the journey.
1:16:22 1 is questioning why it has to be Mr. Pink. It says Mr. Orange has a cool sounding color, why can't it be Mr. Orange? Lol great job solving this, Simon!
took me 96:00 and some peeking at the video, but the end result was well worth the effort!
45:00 If grey goes into r6c6, then purple can't enter the vault. Since blue and green also can't enter the vault, you have 3 regions missing the vault. This is a contradiction since we know 7 regions enter the vault. (Blue can't enter the vault because of the number of squares that are needed to complete the bottom regions.)
Row 5 Column 3 was waiting so so long to be seen.... Great solve and good colouring
I didn't know purple, pink, and orange are the same colour though
Got most hung up on how to fit 7 regions into that large vault, but we got there! Great puzzle, great solve! 👍
While you did miss that 5 for a while, I think you can blame it on the vaults being kinda hard to see :)
More importantly, that logic with the 7 black entrances to the bottom right was pure brilliance on your part. Well deduced!
Around 45:20, isn't just the case that if gray takes R6C6 there is no way for purple to reach the vault? But as already observed it must reach the vault!
13:27 Simon turned into his own pantomime
"oh no we can't"
"oh yes we can!"
1:19:08 "That must do something"..... forgetting about r7c9 lol
It's the standard not cleaning up flashes, and having them disrupt scanning.
At 1:06:26 I wasn't expecting Simon to say "Full HAM" at all.
Completed this one on my own in 128:34! Very fun puzzle, even though I got stuck for quite a while on not realising that the 5-cell vault in the bottom left corner couldn't have a 4 in it. Puzzle seemed to solve rather quickly after I noticed that :D
i think simon got a bit overwhelmed with visual noise here and missed some quick deductions, especially when he started mixing up colors at the end. I think that r2c6 deduction was available a few min before simon arrived at it but he still got there. A great solve all around
Why describe the 2nd purple region as pink repeatedly - and then once call it orange!
Was I the only one breathing a sigh of relief at 1:00:20 when he finally cleaned up those 5's?
(I probably have the least amount of sudoku skill of anyone watching this, so I am *not* criticizing. This man is a genius!)
Spoke too early. Get rid of the 5 in the grey, too, Simon! Lol
1:14:10
😶
Simon, you would have had it so much faster if you took the 5 out of the bordering digits to the cage on the big cage! It sat there as you said "let me check the cage magic again" like 4 times! So many things to look at on this one, though, tough puzzle. Awesome job! haha
I’m truly chuffed to have finished this one, even if it took me over 3 hours!! Very enjoyable nonetheless.
I love the way Purple can come to be Pink and Orange. LoL
Not that I could of done this myself….but I was screaming when you would say “vault logic” and then NOT use it for ALL vaults!!!!
R7C9 sat as the only undetermined cell in C9 for minutes at the end - should have been resolved as the 6 went into C9. Simon - I believe the black flashes are disrupting your scanning!
Simon kept proving and reproving the same things. He proved that purple and grey both had to enter the big vault because there weren't enough regions left but then spent what felt like ten minutes trying check if purple could avoid entering the big vault. In doing so he proved that the entries were different colours about five times too
Simon, I think you may have missed that once you had discovered that the big vault had 7 different colours on the North and West border, the 4 bottom lines (yellow red, orange and purple) did miss 3 cells to complete the 4 regions: 2 cells on the left taken by green and on cell taken by on of the other colour entering the big vault (in r5c7) Once that was given, it was quite obvious that r5c4, r5c5 and r5c6 had to be used to fill in for the 3 missing cells and the bottom regions the could draw almost automatically.
77:28 for me. Ok this one almost drove me nuts. I had to check the ruleset like three different times because I just couldn’t believe the puzzle would have a solution. Definitely the most insane sudoku I have ever solved by far.
I think going so long and being close to the end started getting to you as 1:24:10 That’s a very pink orange :P (Great solve, btw. I’m glad I can watch someone solve these as I wouldn’t even know how to start, little alone finish it!)
He couldn't decide whether to call it pink or purple, so settled on orange as a compromise. 😂
Was this a mistake? At 39:35 when he's separating all the "exit" cells from the big vault, he puts a line between r6c7 and r6c8. But those two cells could connect, couldn't they? It only matters that each exit cell is different.
It's easier to prove that blue can't hit the large vault. If you make it leave the maximum space below it, by extending it to C9 then dipping down, there are still only 41 cells below it, for five trapped 9-cell regions, and you need at least 6 regions to touch the vault, so at least one more region must hit the vault. If you try to bring blue down earlier, to leave an escape up the right hand side, none of the previously trapped regions can reach the exit. This means you can rule 8 out of the vault, because at least two regions can't get into it. You missed that, as soon as 5 was placed in the pentomino, it had to go into the vault in R6. It can't go in green, because it touches the pentomino. It can't go in purple, because it would repeat. When you eventually spotted this, your mouse was pointing at a pair of 589s touching the vault on the outside, whilst saying it did nothing. Wakey, wakey! You've said 5 can't go next to the vault.
Why can you not see that grey could never go next to orange on the edge of the large vault? If it did, how does purple, which you'd already shown also touch one of the border cells, get out in order to do this? I think part of your problem, particularly towards the end, was that you were just asking the wrong questions at the wrong time. You could have asked where 2 goes in grey much earlier, and you could have asked where purple gets its 9, and you'd have quickly finished it.
I found it easier to delete the colour from all completed regions. This not only let me see the vaults, it also made it obvious which regions were incomplete, and let me use colouring to identify other things, such as which 12 was which, without resorting to flashing colours, which is almost always messy and confusing.
It's bad enough for those of us who are colour-blind, without you calling a purple 2 "orange". Purple is just about the least orange colour there is! There isn't even a colour you could call orangey purple, or purpley orange. Are you trying to shake our chromatic confidence even more? There were other similarly weirdly misnamed colours in this. You called blue "green", which was particularly confusing, because that cell could be either blue or green and your deduction made no sense.
This was certainly a hard one, deserving its 5/5 rating, but possibly not a 10/10 rating. I thoroughly enjoyed it, some hard puzzles seem more like torture, but this was more like a voyage of discovery. The idea that the large vault needed 7 regions to enter it, yet also need to fill the huge empty expanse at the top was worrying for a while.
After two hours yesterday I broke the puzzle. Restarted today, sprinting through the first deductions on the left side of the grid and knowing that the big vault had to have seven regions, it still took an hour and a half to solve!
45:37, if purple did not take from the vault, you'd need to complete 4 regions in less than 4 rows.
@43:58 The easy way to see that r6c6 isn't grey is just to note that because blue and green don't get into the vault, and 7 regions must get into the vault, purple must get into the vault and making r6c6 grey cuts off purple's access to the vault
Great solve! Based on your channel's thumbnail, you should really give a game called "Monument Valley" a stream, I think you both would really enjoy it. Cheers
Simon: erases the 5 pencil marks from row 6.
30 seconds later: There must be a 5 in this row ... I'm sure I already worked that out ?
States emphatically that we shall not place more than 4 pencil marks in a cell, then joyfully pencil marks “12345” in five cells!
Hi Simon, have you set a puzzle before?
A much easier way to see the blue not being in the big vault is that if blue is in the big vault, then you have to fit the lower 5 regions, requiring 45 cells in total, into the bottom five rows excluding the four cells being removed for the green and the blue, so 41 cells at most, making it impossible, even if there is an escape route for one, because none can reach it.
42:35 When trying to figure out how grey gets into the vault after determining that purple must also get into the vault, wouldn't that rule out all possibilities of grey blocking off purple?
I'm not even going to try. Looking forward to the solve!
1:21:18, while the mouse is hovering over the 9 which can only be in r2c6 in purple: "This is probably gonna be about some weird digit that can only go in one place in one of the regions, I wonder what that digit is"
man it was really frustrating that he said early on that blue couldn't get into the vault, so purple and grey had to be in the vault, but each time he was trying to prove where grey went he kept ignoring the fact that grey was blocking off purple.
@1:13:50
Wow, Simon, I'm not sure you're supposed to do that
[Cute though] lol.
That 5 pencil-mark [in r6c7] can't be adjacent to that "vault" ["vault logic" it has a 5] , so that was an 8-9 pair to start with [in r5c6&7] fixing something else already.
[[The "7" in r5c3]]
Cute though
[It solved onward from before here -- straining though -- but fun]
[Among other things, I noticed that "1" in r3c6, had to be PURPLE -- because the others all had their 1s ]
CUTE THOUGH LOL
😂😎👍☕☕🥃🥃
Oh, I'm not explaining
Green needs a 2.
[And it has to find it in r1c3 -- nine cells away by chance , completing it]
And green already has a 1
[I'm not sure if it's in these pencil marks though]
[[Edit: YES, the "1" is there in "green." ]]
[[And the "1" in r2c2 is blue -- or it would be isolated]]
The only thing I didn’t like was that Simon didn’t clean up the black slashes when he finished it but, after that beautiful beast I forgive him :)
It may have helped visually to trace the vaults with the dark green line rather than the regions.
I don't get why I find puzzle like this easy and then a simple killer sudoku can destroy me... This took me 25 min and killer from yesterday took me 1.5h lol
Simon is very very good at mental arithmetic but isn't quite as strong in these geometric/visual style puzzles. For example starting at around 20 minutes he spends some time trying to work out if the blue box can get inside the large vault in the bottom right but it's pretty clear you can't do it without cutting off the other colours below. He's sort of like a robot in that sense he needs to "prove" it can't be done which means going through every single option and rule them all out individually. You probably looked at it for 10 seconds and realised it wasn't possible and moved on.