The deduction starting at 23:45 had me stuck and made me give up to check how you are supposed to continue here. Had fun up until that point and then it was pure frustration..
I think it was actually kinda boring tbh, it’s much more fun with the real fog of war puzzles where there are actual clues hidden under the fog (here that was the case only in the beginning).
Well, a lot of difficult puzzles, by their very nature, have to be pretty linear up to a point. My concern was that it was going to be trivially easy to identify the next weak spot in the puzzle, even if the logic at that spot might have been difficult, all the way through to the end. It didn't end up being that way and I think that deserves some praise even when knight's-move constrain are not my preferred kind of puzzle.
I know. I mean, five of the boxes (including all three along the bottom) are clueless for heaven's sake! I guess that's the power of the knight's move constraint. Edit: I guess I've forgotten about the diagonal clues going through four of those boxes. They also help. 😂
@@flinty8121Ah, so it I what I thought they was. That they are already printed in the grid and reveled then the right number is written in that cell..?
To me it wasn't completely clear, whether there are always four digits in the circles. But at some points this is an important assumption for progress. Yeah, it states "circle quads" in the rules but a addendum like "there are alyways four digits in a circle" would have been a bit more clear.
God, that was hard. I managed about 2/3 of it and then got hopelessly stuck, mainly down to bad logic where I'd misread the circle clue and eliminated 3 from r4c3 Extremely fun puzzle.
I was amazed at how quickly Simon picked up the 8s “break-in” (around the 25” mark). I was stuck for ages there, thinking I was missing some obvious clue.
Is anyone else confused by the white circle rule? I thought that the numbers have to appear in order left to right top to bottom, but that rule seems to be broken in this solve
My '3 in the corner' no longer sends confetti but shows music keyboard and words. Anyone know the setting for that? I see Simon's is still the confetti. I like the confetti.
24:04 for me. Took me a while to find all the 8s in the grid and to then get the next digit afterwards, but from there on the puzzle pretty much solved itself smoothly.
I personally feel that the dense fog constraint is quite unsatisfying. Not only is it simply a way to lead you to the right given digit(s) at the time, but it opens for no options other than the linear solve that the clues (or lack of clues) leads to. The first break-in to this puzzle was neat, but after that I honestly don't know how you sat through solving the thing. I personally found it rather uninteresting. Maybe there will be better dense fog puzzles, but for me it goes straight to the bottom of my list of constraints I like.
Duplicates are allowed in quads but there is nothing that says that double digit means two occurrences. I worked out 67 and 34 pairs in the middle box but I thought I can't use it.
The 4 digits given in the circle must appear in the 4 cells around it. If a digit appears twice in the circle then the only logical interpretation is that it appears twice in the 4 surrounding cells.
Gave it a try and got stuck at the point of recognizing how the possible locations of 8's in box 3 bounced to box 1 then box 4. After that it was smoothish sailing to the end. It was interesting that we were given an extra white dot in row 1 that wasn't needed for the solve. By the time it was uncovered the only options left next to the 2 were 1 and 3 for me.
I think a major fault of fog of war puzzles is that they sometimes don't actually use the fog of war. The fog of war here is used at the start for the breakein, but then is completely irrelevant. It just becomes a regular knights move puzzle There was another fog of war puzzle a few weeks ago where you broke it in with some kind of set theory and I don't think a single one of the revelations actually did anything. I wish the setters of these puzzles didn't make their puzzles fog of war just for the sake of it Even the breakin here was a lot easier than the rest of the puzzle so I don't think just removing the fog entirely would even make it any less difficult
I liked the beginning of this, then it got hard and mainly felt like poking around trying to find all the knights move stuff. The white dot on the 2 in r1c45 is mean!
solved before watching Simon.. I must say, it was rather nice watching Simon struggle so much on the knights move logic and the slow slog to solve, as I went through a similar experience... Makes my pain feel better when shared!! lol
Edit: I got it. You're talking about the four cells he had coloured purple earlier. They're no longer purple at 28 minutes, so I was confused. He marked those as having candidates 1289 but they didn't all have to be different, so they were not a quadruple in that sense.
I got it in 56:03 I somehow got tricked into doing a knight's move sudoku! Still a very enjoyable solve, to my surprise. I very much enjoyed the break-in, and then I kept waiting for more quad clues or dense fog..
Way too much Sudoku in this Sudoku for me. The ruleset was fine but the way this was set led me to spending most of my time hunting down tough to see knights move restrictions or looking forward enough to essentially be bifurcating even if I wasn't putting any digits in.
What about a two layered fog, where a correct digit reveals one type of clue, and a second correct digit nearby reveals a different kind of clue? Probably difficult to program, but an interesting idea.
I think the rules need an additional clarification: if the ? comes after a digit X in the quad clue, the ? refers to a digit equal or greater than X. Otherwise I think the deduction about the 3/4 and 6/7 pairs in box 5 aren't valid.
The question mark is an unknown number, but they are still listed in [lazily] increasing order per the rules. Just because it is unknown doesn't allow it to be out of order. I thought it was pretty clear. 🤷♀
That was a great puzzle and I think very doable. I took 84:32 but I suspect I could have well under an hour except I mismarked the white dot connected to the 3 in the center box as 1 or 2 instead of just 2. As you would guess this made things very hard. It wasn’t until much later that I finally noticed my mistake when I found the other white dot 3 in the top row and immediately noticed that it had to be connected to 2.
The 5's did make me think of Phistomefel early and let me to marking them out towards the end and start crossing out digits between the ring and the corners. But now I am wondering, is that actually a valid solve technique?
Needed Simon's insight into (spoiler) r7c89 and the hint about using the "ring" (which he didn't do, but I did), but otherwise plain sailing. Lovely puzzle, constructors are really running with this fog idea! Maybe they know it increases their chances of being featured on this channel.
This puzzle felt like a prank of some sort. The setter crams all the clues in the center of the grid and leaves everything else empty, knowing the solver is waiting to find some new clue to make things easier and will be tortured when it never happens.
Yeah, ngl, I don't know how Simon managed to feel good solving one. the start was fine but the circles ran out fast and past that point the only purpose of the fog seemed to be to give false hope. Personally I think the thick fog just shouldn't be used with knights move. The whole point of a fog that obtrusive would be to hide clues for as long as posible so making the puzzle mostly reliant on the one common rule with 0 clues for the fog to cover seems irritating at best. And besides tbh knights move always was a ruleset I didn't particularly care for unless it was combined with something to make it work, like the miracle sudoku. (which tbh only felt as good as it did due to novelty. But that aside, it was actually kinda the antithesis of this one. Completely honest and straightforward and putting pieces made things easier and easier instead of leaving you more and more lost.)
@@thespanishinquisition4078 When I read your comment and how many references you had to honesty, I checked your user name to see if there was any relation there. To be completely honest, I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition. (Nobody ever does)
I was having so much fun figuring out the logic on all the little question mark circles and then got to the part where it's just an annoyingly tough regular knight's move sudoku puzzle and stopped having very much fun at all
It makes using the replay function pretty redundant. (It doesn't show the fog being cleared, so it seems to start with a fully completed grid, and the cursor just jumps around the grid appearing to do nothing).
I did the ending of this in a wildly different way than Simon, and yet I still had that white dot telling me something I already knew. I really wonder what the intended solve is for this, because my way was just as tortured as Simon's
I solved this and was convinced I missed something obvious seeing that dot. When I watched Simon's response to it I felt much relief that I wasn't just losing it.
At puzzles I'm normally sucky But this time I got really lucky. I was first to get through! But credit were due: I watched you at all times I got stucky. (Leaves a virtual cupcake with a highly attentive cat drawn on top)
I just noticed that this sudoku had 81 givens, and I just remembered a puzzle where a bug didn't allow all the fog around a cell to clear when the digit you discovered was also given. (The video was titled "the worst puzzle..." or something like that). That bug apparently allows this puzzle to work.
Seems to be a false assumption @15:37. Why can't the circle clue be 5888? Can't repeat 8 in the box, sure, but the rules specifically allow repeats in the circle. @48:30 Why can't the 1 be in column 5 row 9? Lucky guess or hidden logic?
Simon, you were right, the 13 deduction in box1 was not the intended path. In Box1 you had pencil-marked '2', they formed a pattern that eliminated a cell (R2C4) in box2, together with the cells eliminated by '2' from box3, they reveal that in box2 '2' are in row1, striking back in box1 and revealing the '2' there. Also, please... start your videos with explaining the rules fully and give all greetings while we solve the puzzle. You almost started this video by explaining the rules.
I think I missed something, cause R1C4-5 had a clue that I didn't need - by the time I unfogged it, the only numbers available were all correct. Still, solved it in 69 minutes.
What is the purpose of the white dot in row 1? I don't get it. The path I took made it completely redundant. Did I take an unconventional route or place an unjustifiably correct digit? (edit: Simon just made the same observation. What's going on??)
I was thinking for a bit at the point where Simon at 56:30. My "break" that cleared all the rest was noticing that R1C2 has two possible numbers, 2 and 6, except would make 2 impossible to place in box 2, and then the rest of the puzzle just collapsed to sudoku with some small knight constraint.
(Didn't read the 290 comments, but what about that rule where all the #s in a quad sort lowest to highest going L to R and top to bottom, yet in box 5 that does not work out that way?! 9-4-3-5 does not follow that rule because 9 is in upper L corner and is the largest, not smallest digit. Also, that 9 in box 5 doesn't obey the rule when looking at the quad in boxes 4/5 because the 9 is on top of the 3, and in box 4 the 3 is over the 2. I obviously am missing something?) Oh-I see-, 21 min in---very poor explanation of the rules. The #s in the quads meaning the circle, not the cells. We have had other puzzles where this rule applied to the #s in the cells. Argh!
came back from doing the puzzle because i'm confused by the rules. doesn't the 9 in r4c4 break the rule of the numbers in a quad being in order? it seems to me that whatever the question mark digit is must be smaller than 9 and appear below/to the right of the 9. am i misunderstanding the rule? edit: just realized i think the instruction means that they're in order in the clue, not in the solution
@@colinekszczecin yes, the rules he posted are unclear. I'm guessing the original rules stated that the numbers in the quad CLUE must read that way, not just in the quad, which refers to the four cells themselves. It happens sometimes here, where they post the rules incorrectly and I am sure he will mention it in his next video.
@@studgerbil9081There is nothing wrong with the rules. The word 'quad', is defined as the white circle two sentences before the sentence about sorting, while the 'surrounding cells' are referred to as such.
@@christhecyclist5998 It is confusing, I thought the same thing. The "quad" could easily be seen as the four (quad being four) cells surrounding the circle by people who do not know the terms. It should be clearly defined in the rules themselves.
I usually love fog of war, but I found this to be a dull puzzle. The logic mostly wasn’t interesting and this felt largely like a grindy, ordinary sudoku where the fog really wasn’t doing much.
Normally I'm much slower. Occasionally I win by a minute or two, but it still feels like a loss since I'm not explaining logic along the way. This puzzle I solved in 20:32. I don't know why I made it through so quick.I suppose I just happened to focus on the right clues at the right time. I just did a GAS set before this and only earned 6 hats on the 5 puzzles. And it was tens of seconds from being 2 or 3 hats.
Can some one explain what 'All numbers in the quad are sorted from smallest to largest left-right, and top-bottom' means, since they patently do not conform to what I understand it to mean. Eg. quad on line between box 2 and 5 is 8642! ??? 8 being larger than 6, 4 being larger than 2, and top two larger than bottom two.
hmm...I very confidently put a 3 in row 4 column 3. I think it was a stray pencil mark, but I was so damn sure. And it was right. It didn't immediately help, I still followed mostly the same path as Simon till about half way through, then it really helped a lot. I wish I could believe I had a good reason...but if I did, then it's gone now....
00:53:59 - Just 3% slower than Simon, substantially better than my normal 100-200% slower range. I was really proud of how quickly I identified the 5 in the center of the board.
I don't know how well it would be but you could try to do either a video series or a patreon reward for November 2024 of "No Number November" and just have a bunch of puzzles without numbers in them.
Please, can somebody explain to me the condition in the rules: "All numbers in the quad are sorted from smallest to largest left-right, and top-bottom." and how this condition is fulfilled in the five quads given. I am not on this level of puzzle solving, but I am trying to get there, and this is a part of the rules I simply do not understand. Thank you!
Neat. Felt like all the interesting logic was exhausted pretty early, though, and the rest was just searching. Still worth solving for the idea, though. 41:59
Is it me, or is the fog technically useless ? or more precisely, making the puzzle easier to start by telling you where to look (and validating your answers).
I feel like the point of the fog should be to gradually reveal clues, that otherwise would make the puzzle too simple or boring, simultaniously providing sensation of discovery, like a treasure hunt. In this case though the puzzle would solve exactly the same with or without fog, and that only added to the frustration after every single digit you put in. In short, this I believe is the first fog puzzle I personally found more annoying than exciting. Even though I was able to almost match Simon's time.
Oh boy, lucky me only needed to use 17:30 mins to realise i read about a knight's move constraint. Duhhh, well let's see if i can get unstuck now. Sofar i like the break-in and the bit ( i discovered) of the following logic allready
Do quad circles always have to have four digits (including interrogation marks)? And if they don’t, do the existing digits have to be in certain specific positions within the circle? Would this sudoku be solvable if this weren’t the case?
No, and thats what made it harder to set. If fewer digits are placed in the quad, the software centers it more and makes then near impossible to see in the fog. Secondly, it makes it harder to determine what numbers are missing as theres no way to give it an order.
I think, once you reveal a quarter of a quad clue, and see a digit (or question mark) revealed exactly in a quadrant of the circle, then you're expected to determine that there will be four digits/question marks in the clue in total. Any fewer and the visible digit wouldn't appear where it does in the circle.
@@brucetheshark4093 Thank you for your answer. That is indeed what I meant: if we see a full digit in a quarter of a quad circle, can we assume that there are four digits in the quad because the software aligns them in a certain way? Let’s say you reveal the upper left quarter of a quad circle and see a 5 in it: according to the way the software aligns the digits in a quad circle, this might be a quad circle with either three or four digits, and in the former case the 5 might not be the lowest digit in the four cells around it. I wonder if, for clarity’s sake, it would be good to include in the ruleset that all quad circles have 4 symbols (digits or question marks). And congratulations for such a cool puzzle! I could not solve it alone, especially because of my inability to think around the knight’s move constraint, but solving it along with Simon was still a pleasure.
59 minutes. It felt both shorter and longer than this. How is that possible? I found the Quad rule super confusing andI wasted a lot of time trying to make sense of it and make it help in the puzzle. I was amazed how many times I got stuck when I thought it was unwinding. For me, that was a puzzle from which I got a huge sense of achievement.
As much as I love fog of war puzzles this one was a bit meh for me. A normal knights move restriction puzzle with the fog not really doing much as the clues behind it are only useful in the very beginning.
22:20 for me. i kinda didnt like the sudoku much, more like the dense fog premise. The sudoku starts blindly and well the break in is OK, but what goes later is only 2 clues that are unlocked in order.. just 2 digits and a disguised knight sudoku.
Beat it in an hour, same as the video run time. Longest puzzle I've solved in the same run time as the video. Beaten it for shorter ones, but nothing this long. I usually don't attempt a puzzle if the runtime exceeds an hour, but I really like the fog puzzles and I know I can cheat if I need a hint. In this one, I didn't cheat and still got it. Got stuck a few times, but eventually found the logical path to solve it. Not sure I always found the intended path. The 2 in the top row has a white dot next to it. By the time I got that, I already had the cell on the other side narrowed down to a 1-3 pair, so that white dot didn't come into play at all. I think it is solvable without that.
The rules are confusing ! What they should stipulate is that *within the given circular area* the digits are sorted. So for example in the 5??? clue, all the digits are greater than 5.
Can't get out of my head the idea of a fog of war sudoku with the rules written on the grid and hidden by fog, with the idea of only the rules that are visible at the moment in the solve path affecting the digits (you can break a constraint before you discover it). However, I think it would be near impossible to make it fun, because there would need to be strong railroading with very few branching paths in the solution. I'll just leave the idea here, maybe someone smarter than me will consider it.
Simon, if you found it frustrating to flail about a bit with pencil marks then at least you should know it was some consolation to us lesser beings who do it all the time (only so much worse)
Simon: "It's really unnerving when you enter a digit, but you can't confirm because there's no more fog to clear"
*Monkey's paw curls a finger*
Skulle inte kunna lösa en siffra själv men det är fantastiskt att se någon som kan, använda logik på detta sätt. Tack!
The deduction starting at 23:45 had me stuck and made me give up to check how you are supposed to continue here.
Had fun up until that point and then it was pure frustration..
white dot along the top row was redundant.
24:46 that’s what a real windmill
Looking at the dense fog rule would not have imagined anything but a boringly hyper-linear solve, really impressed by how well this actually works!
I think it was actually kinda boring tbh, it’s much more fun with the real fog of war puzzles where there are actual clues hidden under the fog (here that was the case only in the beginning).
Well, a lot of difficult puzzles, by their very nature, have to be pretty linear up to a point.
My concern was that it was going to be trivially easy to identify the next weak spot in the puzzle, even if the logic at that spot might have been difficult, all the way through to the end.
It didn't end up being that way and I think that deserves some praise even when knight's-move constrain are not my preferred kind of puzzle.
I solved it in a different order, so not hyper-linear at least. I really enjoyed this.
at 49:50 you said, "You see, there's got to be some sort of knight's trick that I'm not spotting", While tapping on the 3s surrounding row 3 xD
It's remarkable that this solves with so few clues in the grid. Every time I placed a digit, I said "Where are the clues?? I need clues!!"
I know. I mean, five of the boxes (including all three along the bottom) are clueless for heaven's sake! I guess that's the power of the knight's move constraint.
Edit: I guess I've forgotten about the diagonal clues going through four of those boxes. They also help. 😂
The trolling dot 😂
Does no one notice that the digit Simon puts in are black? They have always been blue right?
That’ll be how the setter managed to ensure only 1 cell was revealed. It’s very clever use of the setting software.
@@flinty8121Ah, so it I what I thought they was. That they are already printed in the grid and reveled then the right number is written in that cell..?
@@LillaJag Yes, the grid is solved under the fog which "tricks" the sudokupad logic into not revealing the surrounding cells.
@MrGrog90 its actually really cool that you can do tricks like that!
What are black and white dots????
To me it wasn't completely clear, whether there are always four digits in the circles. But at some points this is an important assumption for progress. Yeah, it states "circle quads" in the rules but a addendum like "there are alyways four digits in a circle" would have been a bit more clear.
God, that was hard. I managed about 2/3 of it and then got hopelessly stuck, mainly down to bad logic where I'd misread the circle clue and eliminated 3 from r4c3 Extremely fun puzzle.
Great puzzle, found it challenging, but a wonderful solve.
I was amazed at how quickly Simon picked up the 8s “break-in” (around the 25” mark). I was stuck for ages there, thinking I was missing some obvious clue.
Is anyone else confused by the white circle rule? I thought that the numbers have to appear in order left to right top to bottom, but that rule seems to be broken in this solve
My '3 in the corner' no longer sends confetti but shows music keyboard and words. Anyone know the setting for that? I see Simon's is still the confetti. I like the confetti.
58:25 I am glad I wasn't the only one who thought the dot in row 1 was kind of useless.
24:04 for me. Took me a while to find all the 8s in the grid and to then get the next digit afterwards, but from there on the puzzle pretty much solved itself smoothly.
Those blue pencilmarks on a dark grey fog are really bad for the eyes. Sven should probably do something about it.
I personally feel that the dense fog constraint is quite unsatisfying. Not only is it simply a way to lead you to the right given digit(s) at the time, but it opens for no options other than the linear solve that the clues (or lack of clues) leads to. The first break-in to this puzzle was neat, but after that I honestly don't know how you sat through solving the thing. I personally found it rather uninteresting. Maybe there will be better dense fog puzzles, but for me it goes straight to the bottom of my list of constraints I like.
Duplicates are allowed in quads but there is nothing that says that double digit means two occurrences. I worked out 67 and 34 pairs in the middle box but I thought I can't use it.
The 4 digits given in the circle must appear in the 4 cells around it. If a digit appears twice in the circle then the only logical interpretation is that it appears twice in the 4 surrounding cells.
Gave it a try and got stuck at the point of recognizing how the possible locations of 8's in box 3 bounced to box 1 then box 4. After that it was smoothish sailing to the end. It was interesting that we were given an extra white dot in row 1 that wasn't needed for the solve. By the time it was uncovered the only options left next to the 2 were 1 and 3 for me.
I think a major fault of fog of war puzzles is that they sometimes don't actually use the fog of war.
The fog of war here is used at the start for the breakein, but then is completely irrelevant. It just becomes a regular knights move puzzle
There was another fog of war puzzle a few weeks ago where you broke it in with some kind of set theory and I don't think a single one of the revelations actually did anything.
I wish the setters of these puzzles didn't make their puzzles fog of war just for the sake of it
Even the breakin here was a lot easier than the rest of the puzzle so I don't think just removing the fog entirely would even make it any less difficult
I agree.
Incredible setting. Take. A. Bow.
I liked the beginning of this, then it got hard and mainly felt like poking around trying to find all the knights move stuff. The white dot on the 2 in r1c45 is mean!
solved before watching Simon.. I must say, it was rather nice watching Simon struggle so much on the knights move logic and the slow slog to solve, as I went through a similar experience... Makes my pain feel better when shared!! lol
At 28 minutes I got confused. You had the purple as a 1289 quadruple but then those 4 blocks didn't use those numbers
Edit: I got it. You're talking about the four cells he had coloured purple earlier. They're no longer purple at 28 minutes, so I was confused. He marked those as having candidates 1289 but they didn't all have to be different, so they were not a quadruple in that sense.
@@RichSmith77 yea when I use "triple" or "quadruple" or something I use it as meaning those blocks are those numbers 1 each so I was confused at first
That was so cool, thank you for this great puzzle. Interesting idea with the mix of the rules and the dense fog ❤
Love the dense fog. A great idea. 52:58.
I got it in 56:03
I somehow got tricked into doing a knight's move sudoku! Still a very enjoyable solve, to my surprise. I very much enjoyed the break-in, and then I kept waiting for more quad clues or dense fog..
I too was trolled by the row 1 dot. I wonder if there was a different way to reveal it before figuring out that spot was only 1 or 3
49:06 for me. it was a big struggle. i am crap at anti-knight.
Let's Get Cracking: 10:36
Simon's time: 49m47s
Puzzle Solved: 1:00:23
What about this video's Top Tier Simarkisms?!
Phistomefel: 4x (13:42, 14:10, 14:23, 14:45)
Bobbins: 3x (32:56, 36:11, 37:41)
Maverick: 2x (08:35, 26:45)
Three In the Corner: 1x (56:53)
Scooby-Doo: 1x (24:34)
You Rotten Thing: 1x (37:37)
And how about this video's Simarkisms?!
Ah: 13x (14:52, 19:09, 26:52, 29:10, 38:13, 39:44, 40:10, 40:16, 42:21, 46:44, 57:21, 59:24, 1:00:13)
Pencil Mark/mark: 11x (25:55, 34:19, 35:47, 36:04, 37:25, 42:42, 44:39, 47:28, 52:47, 55:53, 57:47)
Hang On: 8x (18:12, 18:52, 20:18, 23:16, 28:40, 32:41, 39:49, 43:06)
Cake!: 7x (03:50, 05:23, 05:57, 05:59, 05:59, 06:01, 06:53)
By Sudoku: 6x (19:52, 29:25, 33:54, 43:29, 49:00, 56:36)
In Fact: 6x (13:33, 13:53, 18:09, 24:08, 26:08, 42:21)
Wow: 6x (30:40, 38:46, 49:10, 49:10, 56:14, 56:14)
Obviously: 4x (03:39, 07:50, 09:10, 09:32)
Useless: 3x (17:19, 17:32, 58:31)
Nonsense: 3x (49:17, 49:19, 49:22)
Clever: 3x (18:00, 21:11, 1:00:40)
Goodness: 2x (30:46, 44:44)
The Answer is: 2x (39:32, 39:56)
Lovely: 2x (02:55, 26:00)
Deadly Pattern: 2x (59:39, 1:00:00)
Bizarre: 2x (01:50, 24:28)
Surely: 2x (40:32, 44:39)
We Can Do Better Than That: 2x (37:00, 48:10)
That's Huge: 2x (42:51, 43:26)
What on Earth: 1x (00:43)
Sorry: 1x (04:45)
Naked Single: 1x (33:37)
Out of Nowhere: 1x (48:42)
Naughty: 1x (07:54)
In the Spotlight: 1x (56:57)
I Have no Clue: 1x (27:47)
Brilliant: 1x (04:21)
Take a Bow: 1x (1:00:35)
Shouting: 1x (04:04)
Alacrity: 1x (53:44)
Whoopsie: 1x (30:53)
Thingy Thing: 1x (26:37)
Nature: 1x (19:59)
Symmetry: 1x (16:50)
Most popular number(>9), digit and colour this video:
Thirty Seven, Sixty Eight, Seventy (4 mentions)
One (96 mentions)
White (9 mentions)
Antithesis Battles:
High (2) - Low (2)
Even (9) - Odd (0)
White (9) - Black (5)
Row (16) - Column (14)
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!
You might wanna try iskall85, it would work great with these stats
This is such a fun statistic
Way too much Sudoku in this Sudoku for me. The ruleset was fine but the way this was set led me to spending most of my time hunting down tough to see knights move restrictions or looking forward enough to essentially be bifurcating even if I wasn't putting any digits in.
It wasn't until the very end that I realized this might be the fewest clues I've seen in a fog puzzle. And no given digits!
What about a two layered fog, where a correct digit reveals one type of clue, and a second correct digit nearby reveals a different kind of clue? Probably difficult to program, but an interesting idea.
I think the rules need an additional clarification: if the ? comes after a digit X in the quad clue, the ? refers to a digit equal or greater than X. Otherwise I think the deduction about the 3/4 and 6/7 pairs in box 5 aren't valid.
The question mark is an unknown number, but they are still listed in [lazily] increasing order per the rules. Just because it is unknown doesn't allow it to be out of order. I thought it was pretty clear. 🤷♀
The clues in the quad circle appear in numerical order, even if some of them are redacted as ?s they still go in order.
Knight's Move AND Fog?? Happy Friday to Me!
That was a great puzzle and I think very doable. I took 84:32 but I suspect I could have well under an hour except I mismarked the white dot connected to the 3 in the center box as 1 or 2 instead of just 2. As you would guess this made things very hard. It wasn’t until much later that I finally noticed my mistake when I found the other white dot 3 in the top row and immediately noticed that it had to be connected to 2.
Maybe it's just the day of the week, but I found this to be a slog. Even Simon had to rely on pencilmarks and scanning more than clever deductions.
It seems like all digits were given. They were just hidden by the fog, lol.
Any idea why is there a clue in the first row?
After it was tested, I meant to remove it as it was unneeded. Somehow it slipped back into the fog.
wow i actually did this one in 48m47s, shocked actually, I usually can't do the simon puzzles that take him more than 20-30 mins
The 5's did make me think of Phistomefel early and let me to marking them out towards the end and start crossing out digits between the ring and the corners.
But now I am wondering, is that actually a valid solve technique?
Needed Simon's insight into (spoiler) r7c89 and the hint about using the "ring" (which he didn't do, but I did), but otherwise plain sailing. Lovely puzzle, constructors are really running with this fog idea! Maybe they know it increases their chances of being featured on this channel.
12:48 for me (though, probably distorted a bit because the fog helped me remember that duplicates are allowed in the circles)
These type of puzzles instead of saying, I haven't got a Scooby DOO you should say, "I haven't the foggiest.
This puzzle felt like a prank of some sort.
The setter crams all the clues in the center of the grid and leaves everything else empty, knowing the solver is waiting to find some new clue to make things easier and will be tortured when it never happens.
Yeah, ngl, I don't know how Simon managed to feel good solving one. the start was fine but the circles ran out fast and past that point the only purpose of the fog seemed to be to give false hope.
Personally I think the thick fog just shouldn't be used with knights move. The whole point of a fog that obtrusive would be to hide clues for as long as posible so making the puzzle mostly reliant on the one common rule with 0 clues for the fog to cover seems irritating at best.
And besides tbh knights move always was a ruleset I didn't particularly care for unless it was combined with something to make it work, like the miracle sudoku. (which tbh only felt as good as it did due to novelty. But that aside, it was actually kinda the antithesis of this one. Completely honest and straightforward and putting pieces made things easier and easier instead of leaving you more and more lost.)
Yep, and then that last white dot you have been hoping and praying for ... GIVES YOU NO NEW INFORMATION!
@@thespanishinquisition4078 When I read your comment and how many references you had to honesty, I checked your user name to see if there was any relation there. To be completely honest, I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition.
(Nobody ever does)
I was having so much fun figuring out the logic on all the little question mark circles and then got to the part where it's just an annoyingly tough regular knight's move sudoku puzzle and stopped having very much fun at all
I'm pretty sure the dots in r1 doesn't do anything. Maybe it would have in a different solve path, idk
Okay, I know they were covered by fog, but this has to be the first time a sudoku grid has had 81 given digits in it. 😂
It makes using the replay function pretty redundant. (It doesn't show the fog being cleared, so it seems to start with a fully completed grid, and the cursor just jumps around the grid appearing to do nothing).
What is replay function?@@RichSmith77
I did the ending of this in a wildly different way than Simon, and yet I still had that white dot telling me something I already knew. I really wonder what the intended solve is for this, because my way was just as tortured as Simon's
I solved this and was convinced I missed something obvious seeing that dot. When I watched Simon's response to it I felt much relief that I wasn't just losing it.
My white dot was the same and I just thought "Oh, thanks. Very helpful."
I somehow ended up with the 3 first and used the white dot to get the 2 so I at least found it useful. But it seems that's an uncommon solve path.
ditto
Lovely puzzle! Just right for me! But this is not the first puzzle you have solved on the channel using "dense" fog of war.
At puzzles I'm normally sucky
But this time I got really lucky.
I was first to get through!
But credit were due:
I watched you at all times I got stucky.
(Leaves a virtual cupcake with a highly attentive cat drawn on top)
love it!
I like how at the end he was relieved that it was right... even though each digit lifted fog xD
I just noticed that this sudoku had 81 givens, and I just remembered a puzzle where a bug didn't allow all the fog around a cell to clear when the digit you discovered was also given. (The video was titled "the worst puzzle..." or something like that). That bug apparently allows this puzzle to work.
40:05 ... I did like how the puzzle self-checked by clearing fog one square at a time
Nice puzzle!
The thing I like about dense fog is that every digit placed lets you know if you made a mistake.
41:11, first time I'm beating Simon. And that happening for a video that's over 1 hour, woohoo!
Simon missed an early song opportunity in box 5 - "5,6,7,8" by British group Steps 😁
Wow, what a puzzle! Expecting more clues when fog cleared but left disappointed. When in doubt, probably missed a knight's move somewhere.
Seems to be a false assumption @15:37.
Why can't the circle clue be 5888?
Can't repeat 8 in the box, sure, but the rules specifically allow repeats in the circle.
@48:30 Why can't the 1 be in column 5 row 9? Lucky guess or hidden logic?
Simon, you were right, the 13 deduction in box1 was not the intended path.
In Box1 you had pencil-marked '2', they formed a pattern that eliminated a cell (R2C4) in box2, together with the cells eliminated by '2' from box3, they reveal that in box2 '2' are in row1, striking back in box1 and revealing the '2' there.
Also, please... start your videos with explaining the rules fully and give all greetings while we solve the puzzle. You almost started this video by explaining the rules.
I think I missed something, cause R1C4-5 had a clue that I didn't need - by the time I unfogged it, the only numbers available were all correct. Still, solved it in 69 minutes.
I think 99% of these puzzles I wpuld fail because I misunderstand the rules lol
41:57 ... after a shaky start caused by some confusion over the quad rules
What is the purpose of the white dot in row 1? I don't get it. The path I took made it completely redundant. Did I take an unconventional route or place an unjustifiably correct digit?
(edit: Simon just made the same observation. What's going on??)
I was thinking for a bit at the point where Simon at 56:30.
My "break" that cleared all the rest was noticing that R1C2 has two possible numbers, 2 and 6, except would make 2 impossible to place in box 2, and then the rest of the puzzle just collapsed to sudoku with some small knight constraint.
(Didn't read the 290 comments, but what about that rule where all the #s in a quad sort lowest to highest going L to R and top to bottom, yet in box 5 that does not work out that way?! 9-4-3-5 does not follow that rule because 9 is in upper L corner and is the largest, not smallest digit. Also, that 9 in box 5 doesn't obey the rule when looking at the quad in boxes 4/5 because the 9 is on top of the 3, and in box 4 the 3 is over the 2. I obviously am missing something?)
Oh-I see-, 21 min in---very poor explanation of the rules.
The #s in the quads meaning the circle, not the cells. We have had other puzzles where this rule applied to the #s in the cells. Argh!
came back from doing the puzzle because i'm confused by the rules. doesn't the 9 in r4c4 break the rule of the numbers in a quad being in order? it seems to me that whatever the question mark digit is must be smaller than 9 and appear below/to the right of the 9. am i misunderstanding the rule?
edit: just realized i think the instruction means that they're in order in the clue, not in the solution
I know. I am confused by this as well.
Edit: I think the clue refers to the order of numbers in the circle clue, not the actual numbers around it?
@@colinekszczecin This is correct - whatever numbers are around the clue, must be in order in the clue, but not in the squares around the clue.
@@colinekszczecin yes, the rules he posted are unclear. I'm guessing the original rules stated that the numbers in the quad CLUE must read that way, not just in the quad, which refers to the four cells themselves. It happens sometimes here, where they post the rules incorrectly and I am sure he will mention it in his next video.
@@studgerbil9081There is nothing wrong with the rules. The word 'quad', is defined as the white circle two sentences before the sentence about sorting, while the 'surrounding cells' are referred to as such.
@@christhecyclist5998 It is confusing, I thought the same thing. The "quad" could easily be seen as the four (quad being four) cells surrounding the circle by people who do not know the terms. It should be clearly defined in the rules themselves.
Ended up not needing the white dot revealed by r1c4... probably because I got lost halfway through and went all over the place XD
I usually love fog of war, but I found this to be a dull puzzle. The logic mostly wasn’t interesting and this felt largely like a grindy, ordinary sudoku where the fog really wasn’t doing much.
62:18. I swear I used to be faster at solving these sudokus! I spent a long time stuck but got there eventually.
Normally I'm much slower. Occasionally I win by a minute or two, but it still feels like a loss since I'm not explaining logic along the way. This puzzle I solved in 20:32. I don't know why I made it through so quick.I suppose I just happened to focus on the right clues at the right time. I just did a GAS set before this and only earned 6 hats on the 5 puzzles. And it was tens of seconds from being 2 or 3 hats.
Can some one explain what 'All numbers in the quad are sorted from smallest to largest left-right, and top-bottom' means, since they patently do not conform to what I understand it to mean. Eg. quad on line between box 2 and 5 is 8642! ??? 8 being larger than 6, 4 being larger than 2, and top two larger than bottom two.
Yeah really cool concept :) very nice puzzle! ❤❤❤
hmm...I very confidently put a 3 in row 4 column 3. I think it was a stray pencil mark, but I was so damn sure. And it was right. It didn't immediately help, I still followed mostly the same path as Simon till about half way through, then it really helped a lot. I wish I could believe I had a good reason...but if I did, then it's gone now....
00:53:59 - Just 3% slower than Simon, substantially better than my normal 100-200% slower range. I was really proud of how quickly I identified the 5 in the center of the board.
I don't know how well it would be but you could try to do either a video series or a patreon reward for November 2024 of "No Number November" and just have a bunch of puzzles without numbers in them.
Buffalo buffalo buffalo
Please, can somebody explain to me the condition in the rules: "All numbers in the quad are sorted from smallest to largest left-right, and top-bottom." and how this condition is fulfilled in the five quads given. I am not on this level of puzzle solving, but I am trying to get there, and this is a part of the rules I simply do not understand. Thank you!
Neat. Felt like all the interesting logic was exhausted pretty early, though, and the rest was just searching. Still worth solving for the idea, though. 41:59
Is it me, or is the fog technically useless ? or more precisely, making the puzzle easier to start by telling you where to look (and validating your answers).
at 54:00 (and some time before), couldnt you put 6 in R4C3 as result of soumething something rectangle? as in 37 in every other cell?
I feel like the point of the fog should be to gradually reveal clues, that otherwise would make the puzzle too simple or boring, simultaniously providing sensation of discovery, like a treasure hunt. In this case though the puzzle would solve exactly the same with or without fog, and that only added to the frustration after every single digit you put in.
In short, this I believe is the first fog puzzle I personally found more annoying than exciting. Even though I was able to almost match Simon's time.
Oh boy, lucky me only needed to use 17:30 mins to realise i read about a knight's move constraint.
Duhhh, well let's see if i can get unstuck now. Sofar i like the break-in and the bit ( i discovered) of the following logic allready
The only way those perfect circles are "rugby balls" is if they're being viewed end on.
Do quad circles always have to have four digits (including interrogation marks)? And if they don’t, do the existing digits have to be in certain specific positions within the circle? Would this sudoku be solvable if this weren’t the case?
No, and thats what made it harder to set. If fewer digits are placed in the quad, the software centers it more and makes then near impossible to see in the fog. Secondly, it makes it harder to determine what numbers are missing as theres no way to give it an order.
I think, once you reveal a quarter of a quad clue, and see a digit (or question mark) revealed exactly in a quadrant of the circle, then you're expected to determine that there will be four digits/question marks in the clue in total. Any fewer and the visible digit wouldn't appear where it does in the circle.
@@brucetheshark4093 Thank you for your answer. That is indeed what I meant: if we see a full digit in a quarter of a quad circle, can we assume that there are four digits in the quad because the software aligns them in a certain way? Let’s say you reveal the upper left quarter of a quad circle and see a 5 in it: according to the way the software aligns the digits in a quad circle, this might be a quad circle with either three or four digits, and in the former case the 5 might not be the lowest digit in the four cells around it. I wonder if, for clarity’s sake, it would be good to include in the ruleset that all quad circles have 4 symbols (digits or question marks).
And congratulations for such a cool puzzle! I could not solve it alone, especially because of my inability to think around the knight’s move constraint, but solving it along with Simon was still a pleasure.
There is a precedent with this new type of sudoku fog: Deep in the Darkness by TopAutism 🧐
So many times I have warned people! Don't talk to me at parties!
59 minutes. It felt both shorter and longer than this. How is that possible? I found the Quad rule super confusing andI wasted a lot of time trying to make sense of it and make it help in the puzzle. I was amazed how many times I got stuck when I thought it was unwinding. For me, that was a puzzle from which I got a huge sense of achievement.
As much as I love fog of war puzzles this one was a bit meh for me. A normal knights move restriction puzzle with the fog not really doing much as the clues behind it are only useful in the very beginning.
22:20 for me. i kinda didnt like the sudoku much, more like the dense fog premise. The sudoku starts blindly and well the break in is OK, but what goes later is only 2 clues that are unlocked in order.. just 2 digits and a disguised knight sudoku.
Beat it in an hour, same as the video run time. Longest puzzle I've solved in the same run time as the video. Beaten it for shorter ones, but nothing this long. I usually don't attempt a puzzle if the runtime exceeds an hour, but I really like the fog puzzles and I know I can cheat if I need a hint. In this one, I didn't cheat and still got it. Got stuck a few times, but eventually found the logical path to solve it. Not sure I always found the intended path. The 2 in the top row has a white dot next to it. By the time I got that, I already had the cell on the other side narrowed down to a 1-3 pair, so that white dot didn't come into play at all. I think it is solvable without that.
He didnt use the order of the quadrouple clues. There were many moments were that would be effective.
The rules are confusing ! What they should stipulate is that *within the given circular area* the digits are sorted. So for example in the 5??? clue, all the digits are greater than 5.
Can't get out of my head the idea of a fog of war sudoku with the rules written on the grid and hidden by fog, with the idea of only the rules that are visible at the moment in the solve path affecting the digits (you can break a constraint before you discover it). However, I think it would be near impossible to make it fun, because there would need to be strong railroading with very few branching paths in the solution.
I'll just leave the idea here, maybe someone smarter than me will consider it.
Simon, if you found it frustrating to flail about a bit with pencil marks then at least you should know it was some consolation to us lesser beings who do it all the time (only so much worse)
Dark blue pencil marks on dark gray fog on my phone made this one too hard. Sorry.
34:56 for me
Animation was lagging a bit and made me angry by the end of the puzzle though
i guess it would be better if the pencil marks were black and were also highlighted when double clicking