The Phistomefel Thermometers
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 ต.ค. 2024
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** TODAY'S PUZZLE **
Phistomefel's new sudoku was only released at 2am this morning but Simon is not a creature of great patience when it comes to the great man's works... The puzzle's called Dandelion but how do these (rather short) thermometers do anything useful?!
Do give it a try at the link below:
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Rules:
Normal sudoku rules apply. Digits along a thermometer must increase from the bulb end. Cells separated by a knight's move (in chess) cannot contain the same digit.
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PSA: Puzzle is broken if you forget they are thermometers and try using arrow sudoku rules for about 20 minutes.
lol. I thought they were arrows when I started trying it.
I can't tell you how many times this tripped me up during my watch of simons solve!
I thought it was just me! 😂
Me too
Haha, at least it only took 20 minutes
It's so funny how every time Simon says "I have absolutely no idea what to do" I know within 15 seconds he's going to say "Ahhhh, I see."
And if you have been screaming about something for the last minute (or three) and the cursors is right there, it will be something else he sees.
Well, very pleased that I beat Simon's time on this one. I usually steer clear of anti-knight puzzles as well (not one of my favorite constraints).
Did you use your height to help you beat his time? ;-)
You know what would be a brilliant addition to Sven's Software -> Colour Dots
Rather than colour/grey indicating a possible colouring add coloured dots to the centre or corner markings. You often say this is a red, 3 pair or similar so why not have the notation look like that (An option for when you're not using the alphabet then could be bind different colours to A, B, C, D etc).
Also more/custom colours would be great, I could then choose my own order for colours and what stands out most for me, but also I could avoid running out of colours like you do fairly often, my personal set would be red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, purple, magenta, dark red, brown, dark green, dark cyan, pink, light yellow, light green, light blue, light purple, black, dark grey, light grey with an impact font (white letters with black outline) that shows up on each of my 20 colours.
an alternative to this is to just use letters instead of colors, which are already supported by the software. letters are more accessible for colorblind folks as well 🙂
Agreed. Another layer of some sort. I asked Sven on Twitter for symbols. He graciously replied but said it was too hard atm. But dots, symbols or textured backgrounds (each serving the same feature) would help. Your explanation of coloured dots seems to be the best as they can work with coloured cells.
Letters are fine but I'm dyslexic and I have enough trouble with the 6 and 9 being similar, sure there's going to be a set of letter symbols I'll never mix up with numbers but I never mix up numbers and colours and have a good eye for spotting patterns in colours or differentiating colours.
I am not saying either that letters aren't great in their own way, letters or symbols are fantastic if you're colour blind I'm not suggesting taking that method away for those that need it.
Accessibility for one group should never come at the cost of another group. Sven's app also lacks braile/texture options for blind displays but I wouldn't argue we should get rid of Arabic numerals to add braile numbers or colours to add texturing. Even when I said map the letters to colours it was an additional option as I think most people who would want to use the colours as I described are the ones who can't or don't already use the letters :) not a replacement of that feature
I'm not a fan of colors. I solve on pencil and paper and I use ordered pairs. Where Simon is using yellow and red, I'm using 12 and 21. It does pretty much the same thing as the colors. The only problem is that the ordered pairs make it look like I'm bifurcating...that is, I'm carrying two logical possibilities simultaneously. But it's no different than what Simon is doing with colors.
@@btestware maybe lightly circle it to differentiate your ordered pairs
Just want to say a big "Thank you" to CTC for helping me develop my sudoku skills. The other day I solved my first Phistomefel puzzle ("Thermo X Sudoku") and felt so proud! Your channel is one of the bright spots of the internet.
If you don't have it already, I recommend the CtC Arrow Sudoku app. It includes several Phistomefels, at least one of which I would regard as "not a million miles away from approachable" (i.e. I found it challenging but managed to complete it). It also has some great puzzles from the likes of Qodec and SCL, with apologies to anyone who I've neglected to mention.
Simon has found the perfect loophole for when he wants to pencil in all combinations on a thermo:
-If you're Mr Goodliffe you'd instantly pencil in all possible values, but I don't think that looks very pretty at all.
...and then leaves the numbers in! :)
Also, at playback time 18:12, he did not pencilmark the blue-bulb thermometer (with only three candidates per cell). That slowed down and hindered his solve considerably. His consequent logic struggle was painful for me to watch from playback time 29:19 to 34:36.
I showed above how quick and elegant and fun this solve would have been if Simon had properly pencilmarked the blue-bulb thermometer @18:12.
Interesting fact about dandelions: The white stuff that comes out when you crush the stem of a dandelion is actually rubber latex. You can make rubber from dandelions!
Sounds kinky.
Whatever you do, don't image search "dandelion latex"
The reason dandelions produce latex is to protect their roots from...and I'm not making this up...cockchafer larvae
When we were kids, the "cool kids" always tricked others into eating it hahaha
@@KyleBaran90 I bet those cool kids aren't the demographic of Cracking the Cryptic :P
When you start Goodliffing the colors ... you know Phistomefel owns you!
You always find a way to prevail though Simon, excellent job!
Rules: 05:28
Let's Get Cracking: 07:04
Simon's time: 54m21s
Puzzle Solved: 1:01:25
What about this video's Top Tier Simarkisms?!
Phistomefel: 6x (00:21, 06:46, 20:01, 20:08, 42:05, 1:02:00)
Bobbins: 2x (21:19, 24:02)
Goodliffing: 1x (45:48)
Numpty: 1x (03:18)
And how about this video's Simarkisms?!
Ah: 13x (09:11, 11:23, 11:26, 14:07, 14:09, 21:27, 22:49, 29:48, 49:33, 50:46, 55:12, 57:18, 57:35)
By Sudoku: 12x (07:42, 30:31, 30:48, 38:55, 43:42, 45:17, 45:21, 51:57, 56:39, 56:57, 57:59, 58:03)
Sorry: 10x (01:44, 02:04, 07:10, 16:19, 19:16, 36:57, 37:18, 44:18, 44:47, 1:01:26)
Hang On: 9x (11:06, 28:07, 28:08, 33:50, 36:51, 36:56, 42:32, 54:59, 1:01:11)
Pencil Mark/mark: 8x (06:39, 10:53, 18:26, 29:03, 29:13, 36:56, 41:53, 49:07)
Beautiful: 7x (14:39, 21:34, 22:56, 27:36, 50:57, 51:00, 1:01:54)
The Answer is: 6x (08:15, 22:14, 30:01, 31:47, 42:10, 51:03)
In Fact: 6x (11:59, 28:51, 31:35, 38:09, 40:49, 52:47)
Nonsense: 3x (25:26, 25:41, 42:16)
Stuck: 3x (27:22, 59:09, 59:11)
Obviously: 3x (15:48, 28:32, 55:41)
Goodness: 2x (16:16, 22:10)
I Have no Clue: 2x (44:47, 53:43)
Gorgeous: 2x (08:27, 08:29)
We Can Do Better Than That: 2x (10:27, 40:17)
Wow: 2x (42:46, 46:19)
Good Grief: 1x (38:40)
Apologies: 1x (01:52)
Naked Single: 1x (40:30)
Clever: 1x (22:07)
Recalcitrant: 1x (48:13)
Naughty: 1x (1:00:46)
Lovely: 1x (57:35)
Ridiculous: 1x (41:06)
Deadly Pattern: 1x (55:06)
Shouting: 1x (47:59)
If I Trust my Pencil Marks: 1x (36:56)
Magnificent: 1x (02:09)
Think Harder: 1x (49:19)
Chromatic: 1x (1:01:18)
Sudoku in a Sudoku Puzzle: 1x (57:13)
Nature: 1x (45:37)
Cake!: 1x (03:00)
Unique: 1x (01:00)
Genuflection: 1x (02:13)
Most popular digit and colour this video:
Five (86 mentions)
Red (60 mentions)
Antithesis Battles:
Low (3) - High (1)
Even (10) - Odd (1)
Lower (18) - Higher (1)
Black (10) - White (0)
Row (11) - Column (9)
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!
bobbins!
Chuckled just for Mark's reason, but then laughed outloud at your further commentary about the availability. Love it
I love when Simon pulls out the coloring book.
12:00 - those thermos are WAY more constrained than Simon is giving them credit for. If blue is 7, orange can be 5 (it can’t be 6, because 8 and 9 are taken by the blue thermo and it doesn’t have another digit above 6 available). Likewise, green can’t just cap at 4 for the same reason and must be 2 or 3.
So finally, you have blue at max 7, orange at max 5, green at max 3, and yellow at max 2.
11:37 look where green goes in box 4 as well. There is at leas one more digit than yellow that is lower than green. Removing one as a possiblity for yellow. Not sure if Simon gets that before your 12:00 mark.
@@57thorns you’re absolutely right. From that point and my point, that’s already enough to logically deduce that yellow is 1 and green is 3.
@@mattinm What I manage to deduce was just a 12 pair in box 5 and that yellow is in the middle because both the bulbs in box 4 sees r5c5 and have to be less than green. Neither 1 nor 2 can be on any thermo in the center box. Green becomes 3 and 4 is in r5c6. Working on from there now.
If he could figure out how to pencil mark thermos properly it would have been a 30 minute solve. His vids are getting more ploddingly painful by the day.
@@ceevio_art Yes it was painful to see Simon's struggle for at least 5 minutes (from playback time 29:19 to 34:36) due to his stubborn refusal to properly pencilmark thermos (e.g. the thermo with blue bulb was restricted to 3 candidates per cell since time 18:12).
That's painful because @10:49 he moked Mark for fully pencilmarking very short thermometers at the start, when they have no restrictions, which is something Mark *never* does, and said it would be *ludicrous* watching Mark's solve of this puzzle.
Too bad 😐👎
On the contrary, I think Simon would learn a lot by watching Mark's solve.
Simon, you're my second favorite youtuber. The first one is Drunk Simon.
😄
32:12 - You have letters now Simon! You can mark one set of things you know with letters and the other with colors, which makes it more obvious letters and colors can overlap!
32:59 for me, I’m very pleased to beat Simon time on a phistomephel puzzle !! :D Back a year or so ago, I could hardly finish any of them without the help of the video. This one felt really smooth, I absolutely loved it.
I very much enjoy these longer videos where I can just sit and listen for a while as I work on my various projects and not worry about the fast moving video switching of shorter TH-cam videos
Remember those landline phones with the gigantic number buttons that your gran had?
Can we get Simon a keyboard with those proportions for his birthday? 😂🍰🥳
Funny thing. I'm not afraid to use uniqueness in my solves. This puzzle had the biggest uniqueness jump I've ever made. As soon as the 2nd-to-last thermo had been used, I was able to write 1 and 2 into the thermo in box 1.
I, too, shamelessly considered this possibility only to reject it. I was glad when I reached a position when column 1 of box 1 was a 123 combo. 12-3-12 was a possible answer, with the restriction that we know the colors of the 12. What a brilliant way to screw over such shameless guessers! Alas, the combination was 123, and the color of 1 was known.
@@achad1607 12-3-12 wasn’t actually possible - not by the rules of sudoku, but by the rules of sudoku construction! If that top-left thermo didn’t disambiguate red and yellow, then there was no other way to do so. So it had to be 1-2-3 for the puzzle to have a unique solution
Simon makes me laugh every time he mentions Mark's pencil marking🤣
More often than not, he would be way better off pencilmarking thermos at least after some initial thoughts. Here it would have saved him 10 minutes of aimless searching (and about 100 mistyped digits).
What amused me here was that when Simon really needed to Goodliffe the blue thermo, he's so out of practice that he couldn't do it properly!
Did anybody else notice that the four bulbs outside the center box, plus the remainder of the blue one, make a 6-cell virtual thermo? I think that would have saved 15 or 20 seconds in the solve.
I thought the eye check asterisk was gonna say "Congrats, you passed!"
i was expecting something like "you should consider getting checked if you couldnt read this" :D
I was expecting some reference to being able to scan to the bottom row of a sudoku
I was expecting “if you can read you don’t need to show up”
Interesting.... Simon give Mark crap for pencil marking thermos but then proceeds to go on and perform copious amounts of coloring and pencil marking himself. Then Simon screws up his thermo pencil marks because he's out of practice with trimming thermos and has to unwind part of the puzzle to figure out the mistake.
Love the detour at 20:00 for Simon to compare himself Sherlock Holmes
His point was that Holmes did *not* get vexed by Moriarty while Simon *does* get vexed by Phistomephel. Therefore, Simon cannot be Holmes.
I hope you have an amazing birthday!! By the way, my and my twin sister’s birthday’s also June 8 so really looking foward to tomorrow’s video as it will be a definite highlight of my birthday!
Love your videos!! My sister and I have been watching the channel for quite some time now and we love discussing them afterwards!
Happy Birthday!
@@LiquorStoreJon Thank you!! 😄
I don't watch all the one-hour videos, but when I get a chance, I like to watch the most interesting-looking long video I haven't seen, and Phistomefel puzzles are always that.
61:16
Yep, this was definitely a Phistomefel puzzle! For once I managed to avoid using more than 9 colours at least.
For a while it was obvious for uniqueness was the tiny top left thermo had to be but it took an agenfinding the solve path to prove it.
Utterly brilliant as usual.
The longer the CTC video, the better I say! Cool solve Simon, that was fun to watch
I love the little quote box with your error, helps prevent me from rage posting a comment 😜
Happy Birthday, Simon! Wishing you well from Indiana!
26:17 Moment when Simon becomes Mark! Just instead of numbering, he is using colouring.
This was special since it was the phistomofel puzzle I solved on my own. For me Mark's strategy of goodliffing the center box thermos would have helped after the initial max limits were determined for all the bulbs. Simon is so logical that one understands the puzzles better by watching the steps he takes.
Yes, I showed above how quick and elegant and fun this solve would have been if Simon had properly pencilmarked the blue-bulb thermometer at playback time 18:12, with only three candidates per cell.
You can show that *green* can only be 3 or 2 immediately from about 09:00 onward simply by counting!
*green* *
I think Phistomefel sets these puzzles know the joy Simon will emote when finding the break-in. Especially this time with colors and anti-knight fun! Love it!
Such an ingenious break in. And it’s so elegantly telegraphed too. One of the best puzzles from phistomefel.
That was incredible. Beautiful from Phistomefel as usual and incredible solving from Simon as usual. The box 5 break-in especially is just incredible.
31:58, probably my fastest time in a Phistomephel to date. Extremely pleased with that. And lovely puzzle as usual.
I'm super excited for another Phistomefel video. I'm going to save this video for Sunday June 12, my birthday!
I'll just go ahead and say it, this took me HOURS... but I was determined not to give up. What a head-scratcher. Even with knowing how to go about solving the puzzle, I struggled most every step of the way. Glad to have it done... kinda didn't want it to end when I neared the finish!
Wow, it took me 90 mins + (with distraction from my puppy dog), but I solved a Phistomephel puzzle without bifurcation! Now, I will take my time to watch Simon's solve. Boy, I am certainly in for a treat! 😁
I solved this earlier this week. Took me about 42 minutes iirc. I don’t do a lot of 4 star puzzles but this one makes sense. One of my favorites of all time. Thanks Phistomefel.
i'm very interested in how phistomefel, the great, actually looks like... and also when in Simon's birthday 😊
? It's in the thumbnail!! :)
I am too. Part of me wants to imagine a Rasputin looking character working in a shadowy, candlelit library. But I bet he looks like a clean cut, slightly nerdy engineer. But who knows
@@CrackingTheCryptic 😄
I'm waiting every evening for these videos.
The good thing about youtube is that is says how long the video is before we even click the link, so we know we're in for an hour long video. You're good
Usually I struggle with Phistomefel puzzles, but this one was surprisingly approachable. There was a moment in the middle where I struggled, but I finally spotted the intersecting row and column that had a single digit limitation forcing it into the intersecting cell. Very nice setting, indeed! Thanks! Now to see how Simon got along. :)
Happy birthday, Simon! I'm always so happy when I see there's a new long video from you, and doubly when that little devil logo pops up!
Funny thing, after I solved it (won´t mention my time again lol), and resumed the video at the ´let´s get cracking´ moment, you applied almost identical logic as I. That means I am finally starting to see the more intricate possibilities in hard puzzles. Really happy I got this far, thanks to you. Love it!
Phistomefel puzzle released the day before Simon's birthday - seems to me like an early birthday gift! It had to be released early because otherwise Simon would have been so gorged on massive amounts of Cake (always pronounced as starting with a capital letter) that he would be a bit too bleary to do it justice. But as usual, you do indeed do it justice, Simon. This, after all, is ab initio based on Phisomefel + Simon = great pleasure to all. (I may well not have used that classy Latin phrase just right in terms of syntax - I hope you will forgive me for attempting to do a pre-birthday tribute to your wonderful vocabulary!) And actually, even to my fairly novice (still) sudoku-solving self, that seemed almost as if I might be able to solve that puzzle ... I will bookmark it and maybe give it a try. It certainly was very easy to understand when you did it, Simon, and explained it. I had to laugh out loud at your yellow word balloon assuring us all that you figured out the mis-pencilmarking of that thermo in box 5. I could just picture hundreds of viewers scrambling to pause the video at that spot so that they could explain what you did wrong there! (And to all of our credit, no one seems to have done that, in my skimming of the 117 comments left before mine tonight.) Anyway, I hope you have a very wonderful birthday tomorrow. By the time I see a video from you tomorrow it will be practically the next day for you, so I'll take this opportunity to wish you the best of the day now.
Another masterful display of setting from Phistomefel. Because his puzzles are not difficult enough to start with my brain initially decided to add an extra hurdle by interpreting thermos as arrows.
When I realized the disambiguation of one and two before Simon I got extremely excited to see him realize it a minute or two later
A fantastic and absolutely exciting puzzle. Sometimes I don't know where and how to start. But Simon is a master at that and that's why I let myself be inspired for a few minutes. The coloring of the box 5 was an ingenious jump-start, so that I could solve the puzzle. Although it took me almost three times as long as Simon, I definitely had fun.
No thermo above length 3, nor any sort of fish in sight, yet this puzzle solves beautifully. The break in to this is one of the funnest of any puzzle I've seen featured on this channel. Now to watch and see what Simon made of it.
This is my first solo Phistomefel solve. Always need to watch the videos to help me along! Took me longer than Simon (obviously) but I started differently:
I coloured the thermo sticks in the central box and found them in the neighbouring boxes. I got digits quite quickly doing that, but the rest was hard! Good to see Simon's solve after and pick up a few more tricks!
Me just a couple of days ago: I LOVE thermos and knights moves!
Phistomefel: Here's a knights move. Build your own darn thermo!
Me: Thank you!!!
😁
Happy birthday, Simon! May you have a large, sophisticated, grown-up cake at lunch with friends, followed by a big, elaborate one to delight your children at dinner with the family!
20:16 - In fictional land, check out The Night Circus, Simon! - I'm assuming you quite like flowery, evocative prose (given your love of The Raven), and it's about two rival magicians who stump each other so much that they create a supernatural, seemingly-eternal travelling circus as their personal arena!
Had to chuckle that it took sudoku to sort out the final disambiguations! Happy Birthday 🎂
That was only 1 step away from Mark's trouble spotting I wings. Maybe could call that an L wing
Always amazed by the brilliant logical deductions Simon often makes which are much more complicated than needed… like the long winded way of figuring out the red-yellow pair in box 1. I reckon it was much simpler to figure out that if red goes on the tip of the thermo then the bulb is yellow, and if red doesn’t go on the tip then the only place for yellow is the bulb 😋. Anyway, this is part of what makes this channel so appealing: the glorious moments when I am able to “outsmart” someone like Simon (which of course makes me conveniently forget the other 20 logical deductions he’s made through the course of the puzzle that I would never have spotted by myself 😂😂)
Your logic places yellow in the bulb, granted, but it doesn't give you a yellow/red pair. You still don't know where red goes. So Simon's logic, or some variation of it, is still required to get the red/yellow pair on the thermo, and hence work out which is 1 and which is 2.
some advice simon: at 1:00:00, when i get stuck at the end, i usually ask myself: what are the x wings? in the first 3 rows, we have an X wing on 4’s, 6’s,7’s and 8’s. so by normal sudoku, we can’t find a solution. i do see however, we do NOT have an X wing on 3’s. so i’d look for a 3 that sees the 37 pair and lo and behold, there is a useful 3 in row 3, column 1.
if it had turned out that everything was an x wing, then we know we would have needed to use the knights move or other puzzle logic to disambiguate everything.
hope this helps, after over a year of learning, i hope i could teach you something
Wow ! What a puzzle ! Took me about 5hours spread on 4 days to solve. One of the most rewarding puzzles I have solved so far
It's also quite a bit easier to break into the puzzle by sorting out the centre box and the value of *blue* if you use the thermo stub in box 6 earlier rather than getting involved with box 8, because you quickly find that *r4c5* , *r5c4* , *r5c7* , and *r6c5* all see each other and must contain 6,7,8, &9 so all possible value for *blue* give a 5 in *r4c4* etc...
That's very interesting. Thank you for sharing.
By the way, I also showed above how quick and elegant and fun this solve would have been if Simon had *properly pencil-Marked* the blue-bulb thermometer at playback time 18:12, with only three candidates per cell.
I wonder if Phistomefel ever wakes and thinks "What new way can I find to torment Simon today...?".
Loved this puzzle, the break-in (1s, 2s, 3s and 4s in box 5 and column 5) was incredibly elegant (Simon made a brilliant start but then perhaps went a bit off course before the discovery) and the logic in box 4 to fix the thermo was beautiful . Ridiculously clever as always, thanks to Phistomefel for the sudoku and to Simon for a decent solve effort. :)
Thank you so much for fixing the colors at the end :)
This puzzle is so smart and so satisfying in its progression. Congrats to Phistomefel !
Thank you Simon and Phistomefel for entertaining me for an hour this evening. Happy Birthday Simon! Enjoy LOADS of cake.
47:15 finish. I had to take out all of the colors except for 1-2 pairs, as it was throwing me off. I looked at the ring, but quickly realized that it was not needed. Another masterpiece!
This might be your most colorful solve ever! If Phistomofel lords it over you, his reign is short lived because you always manage to solve his puzzles!
I completely adore this guy, you are a genius Simon ❤
Happy Birthday for tomorrow! I hope you get an entire banquet of delicious cakes!
One thing I noticed was that considering what the maximum values of the bulbs surrounding the middle box is that since the tops of the thermos all poke into the middle box each thermo must have a certain number of cells higher than it in the middle box so there is a bigger restriction on the bulbs than Simon pencil marked. For instance orange could never be 6 because there must be four numbers greater than it in the middle box.
Once we resolve what digit a colour is we can remove the colour from the board. It helps a little with the clutter. Colours are just alternate pencil marks after all.
In a sudoku such as this one, the only tools available to disambiguate digits are the thermometers, which means that each pair of consecutive digits must appear together on some thermo or other. By the time that a situation like that of 30:46 has been reached, it's clear that the only thermo that 1 & 2 can both be on is the one in box 1; since, at 30:46, it's also known that r1c5 = 1 or 2, red must = 2 and yellow 1.
Now, one could just fill in the red & yellow cells correctly, relying on the b1 thermo in the solved puzzle to validate the assumption of uniqueness; I prefer to play it a little safer, filling in the red & yellow cells *incorrectly* (i.e. red = 1, yellow = 2), at least until it's proven that this is wrong. Then, or later, the 1s & 2s can simply be switched. Until then, I also ignore the b1 thermometer.
This is how I solved the puzzle, coloring nothing but (initially) the 1/2s (which is handy if one is at all color-blind, as I am). I could have dispensed with coloring altogether, but I think this little bit probably helped slightly.
[EDIT: I see now that Simon & I started completely differently, with him coloring at the very beginning. If one started as I did, it was largely unnecessary, even without disambiguating the 1/2s.]
Same! I used the same logic!
Poor Simon.. he has a great poker face, but you can hear the dread in his voice. I love watching him solve puzzles by Phistomefel. A great constructor vs. a great entertainer / solver😀
It's my Fiancé's birthday as well. Happy birthday Simon!
This took me two hours and 20 minutes to solve... this was painfully hard for me, but an absolutely pleasant experience.
60:12 - The first time I've ever solved in less time than the video and shocked it happened on a phistomefel puzzle.
This is one particular puzzle my brain refuses to function on. It sees certain logical paths, but refuses to elaborate on them.
Happy birthday! - and thanks for all the great solves.
When you get so far into the headspace of knight's move that you miss the basic sudoku fixing the 3/7 pair in box 2 for 2 whole minutes. I was cackling watching you flounder at this!
I feel like knight's move is one of the more surprisingly and beautifully powerful restrictions. The opening of this puzzle feel into place so quickly, despite looking so utterly impossible at first glance.
Halfway through my solve and The Devil is tempting me to use uniqueness
I love Simon's perpetual optimism! "Do give it a go" lolololol :D
"Lower Than Blue" would make a great Jazz album name.
I love knight puzzles (and it pairs so well with thermos), but my contention is that the last part of a knight puzzle always turns into a game of "spot the geometry" to finish up after all the clues are solved.
Finally started watching the video, and I see that Simon & I started off completely differently. I began by narrowing down, in turn, the possible positions of 1-4 in b5, giving me 1-2 in the non-thermo cells, 3 in r6c4 (and r4c7), and 4 in r4c6. Later, I colored 1/2 *only.*
Probably the simplest way to continue is to Goodliffe most of the thermos & start eliminating candidates (which is pretty much what I did).
Exactly my solve path too!
Yes! I've solved a phistomefel puzzle on my own! Goodness me that was incredible.
Happy Birthday Simon!
I love how Simon essentially declares Phistomefel his nemesis over the course of this one. :D
I LOVE the long videos, personally. I enjoy the shorter, more approachable ones as well and haven't really come across any that I DON'T like, so.... :)
I know how much you enjoy Phistomefel puzzles, but when I see a new puzzle by him I know the solve will take at least an hour. This puzzle is no exception. However, your solve is fantastic and the explanation on how you did it.
6 in box 4 - with knights move canceled squares 789 in box 1 to get 6 out and place the 4 - miss it for many minutes.
Wasn't too bad. There was great benefit in an ancient technique I find very helpful on Thermo puzzles called Goodliffing...
Ab initio! I've never heard of that, I love finding new and interesting words or phrases. Thanks!
I loved that puzzle, the red/yellow 1,2 and the green had me stumped for a while, I need to do more knights move puzzles.
Happy birthday Simon!
54:27 there's a quicker way to figure out red/yellow in box 1
If red is on the thermo, yellow has to be in the bulb because it's lower
If red is not on the thermo, it's taking yellow's place, so yellow is on the bulb
I’m not a sudoku setter, but rather an idea man.
Someone needs to make a thermo-sudoku named “Pencil Mark” that literally is IMPOSSIBLE (or at least insanely hard) to solve UNLESS you just put the pencil markings in the thermos. Then send it to Simon.
When Simon started colouring the thermos, I thought “hey, I can do it!”. After finding out the 3, I goodliffed box 5 and the thermos above and below, and so I found the quintuple. I’m very proud to have solved a Phistomephel puzzle in 80 minutes 😁
I had a different way of working out r7c5 (relevant at 31:00 in the video):
r3c5 r4c5 r5c4 and r6c5 all see each other by either sudoku or knight's move, but by thermo logic are all at least 6. These 4 cells also all see r7c5, therefore it cannot be 6 or greater.
Kicking myself because I didn't spot this. Such a useful technique in knight's move puzzles.
Much as I love colours, the whole point is to have a way to signify a digit that you don’t know the value of. Once the value of a digit is known the colour should be removed otherwise things get quite messy.
It's something Simon must have seen requested numerous times, but it doesn't seem like he will ever change. I'm sure he would find scanning a lot easier with fewer colours in the grid. The colours just add to information overload. It also takes unnecessary time to colour every cell.
Since Phistomefel appears to be a god, thank Phistomefel for the ten second fast forward feature on TH-cam.
Or play at 2X so it only takes 30 minutes and you miss nothing.
Interestingly at the 52:46 mark, red and yellow are resolved for me. The only way the values could ever be disambiguated is on the last remaining thermo, which means Red has to be 2 and Yellow has to be 1!
I was just getting my popcorn out for this one as noticed it is over an hour long for Phistomefel puzzle. I got ready to watch it and started the video until I got to 5:23 when I thought it is well under an hour solve now maybe I should attempt it. So I am going to try this one out tomorrow as I probably don't have enough time tonight to do it.