A Moth Has Chewed My Sudoku [Updated Version]
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- čas přidán 14. 05. 2024
- [The rules got muddled up in the first version of this video so we've uploaded a revised version. The algorithm tends to punish videos that we release outside of our normal schedule so we'd be grateful for all the "Likes" and kind comments you can give this one!]
** TODAY'S PUZZLE **
Michael Lefkowitz has done it again with a brilliant and witty new sudoku in which moths have chewed away bits of the grid. There's lots of fresh logic here and a moderate difficulty rating - do have a go!!
Play the puzzle at the link below:
sudokupad.app/24t19yk4uf
Rules:
Place one or more digits from 1-9 in every cell so that each digit appears exactly once in every row, column, and 3x3 box. All the digits in the cell(s) touching each V sum to 5. White dots always separate a pair of adjacent digits (but there can also be additional digits in the separated cells).
** NEW SANDRA & NALA FOG PACK **
A bonus sudoku pack was released on Patreon this week of 5 fog of war sudokus to celebrate the arrival of spring (in the Northern hemisphere) from Sandra & Nala. It's completely free - just click our Patreon link below.
Other treats on Patreon include:
- the new James Bond sudoku hunt competition;
- Simon's latest forays into the world of Islands Of Insight;
- Mark's video looking at the new OneUp puzzle from Rodolfo Kurchan;
- his solve of Region Geometry by Emre Kolotoğlu (3hr 36min long...!);
- and Mark's latest solve of The Times Club Monthly cryptic crossword
/ crackingthecryptic
** GET OUR FOG KICKSTARTER DELUXE & OUR BOOKS **
Check out this link for the kickstarter books and Fog Novella we've created over the years:
coffeebean.games/product-cate...
▶ SUDOKU PAD - Use Our Software For Your Puzzles ◀
You can input classic sudoku puzzles into our software and help support Sven, the programmer responsible for the wonderful user interface we all use to play these puzzles everyday. The app also comes with 12 handmade puzzles from us:
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ALSO on Amazon: Search for “SudokuPad”
▶ Contents Of This Video ◀
0:00 Theme music & puzzle intro
1:17 New crossword video
1:30 Revisiting yesterday's Jay Dyer sudoku
5:20 New Dungeons & Diagrams sudoku!!
7:36 Happy Birthdays
10:28 Rules
13:50 Start of Solve: Let's Get Cracking
▶ Contact Us ◀
Twitter: @Cracking The Cryptic
email: crackingthecryptic@gmail.com
Our PO Box address:
Simon Anthony & Mark Goodliffe
Box 102
56 Gloucester Road
London
SW7 4UB
(Please note to use our real names rather than 'Cracking The Cryptic'.)
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Thank you for solving my puzzle, so glad you enjoyed the moth damange. And welcome back! :)
Thanks for this puzzle! Solved it on LMD a few days ago, and was hoping to see Simon tackle it!
@@martinbull-gundersen8878 I loved the mechanics of this puzzle; would love to see more moth-eaten sudokus in the future. :)
This was a lot of fun, fresh ideas, and not too hard. Loved it!
I object to the use of the word "always" in the rules explanation for white dots. I interpreted that to mean that the negative constraint is active (i.e. non-white-dotted pairs may not be consecutive). Needless to say this breaks the puzzle.
I am happy to see another of your radically innovative puzzles on CTC. You are the most wildly creative setter I know, and every time you come up with a new ruleset you also provide the most *magic* implementation I can imagine... 🏆
👏👏👏👏👏👏
...Of course, I can imagine very little compared to you, but I mean your puzzles are always stratospherically fascinating for me to solve. They are much more than just systematically innovative.
I suppose one way to prevent there from being a 3 in the corner is to get rid of the corners.
That's just adding more corners.
@@Cassius40k A three appears in two corners then
Calling on all geniuses to make a "Moths in the fog" puzzle please!
I actually need this so badly! Someone better make it
Oh, yes please. It would be so interesting
The little speech bubble popup (at around 28:35 in the video) was a great idea!
I'm in awe of how constructors can keep coming up with seemingly simple tweaks to the regular rules, and create such interesting puzzles with the new rule sets time and again.
I colour coded my cells with different colours depending on how many digits they contained. Green - 1 digit, yellow - 2 digits, orange - 3 digits, red - 4 digits.
Oh hey, same colour coding!
I like that, just used it to finish.
I've no idea why Simon didn't do that, would have been much clearer.
I just used two colors. I started with purple for singular digits "happy cells" and that colored most of the grid right away. A few deductions later and I had just a few colored blue for "crowded" unhappy cells and many more colored purple for single digits. I can't remember if I had all of them colored after a few more deductions or if there were a few cells left uncolored a little while longer, but I think I was able to deduce all but a few if not all of them before using sudoku and the other clues to solve for digits.
@@Hakucho64 Maybe because the colors don't inherently tell you how many digits belong in the cell. I tried colors at first and got confused, wound up coloring only normal vs multiple cells and then using pencilmarks to note how many digits belonged there for the multiple ones. Then I just didn't use that kind of pencilmark in the solving.
It might sound silly, but I don't really watch your guy's channel except for when I'm having nightmares. It's 3 AM right now and I just woke up from a horrible dream and immediately turned this video on. It helps so much! For some reason watching someone solve sudoku is so calming to me. Just wanted to say thank you for helping me sleep better! 😅 And I promise to watch more during the day as well! 😂
Simon's voice is medicine for the mind!
Typically watch it at 1.5x speed to prevent falling asleep 😂
@@mononaut I can 💯 percent agree with this. Very calm and soothing voice. His great vocabulary mixed with his witty-ness is also a delight to hear. Great job to you Simon!
- How many digits can you place in one cell of the sudoku?
- Yes.
I love how the video starts with an explanation of how Simon and Mark don’t like “getting lucky” when logically unfounded assumptions end up being correct, and then his incorrect pencil marked 3 in row 6 breaks the puzzle. So glad you didn’t “get lucky” today, Simon.
I have used 4 colors for the different "multiplicities" of cells. That made for an "initial" puzzle to distribute multiplicities and then solve it. Very nice puzzle!
Exactly what I did.
Me too!
making sure the algorithm gets this video to the top!
Where it should rightful be
Just adding to the push for the algorithm - this is too much fun not to be up front in peoples streams! Such a fun idea.
27:53
A really fun and exceptionally well executed idea. These innovation stretch, bend, and thoroughly break any "normal" concepts of pencil-markings too, giving extra workout to the brain.
I am happy to see another of these radically innovative puzzles on CTC. *Michael Lefkowitz* is the most wildly creative setter I know, and every time he comes up with a new ruleset he also provides the most magic implementation I can imagine. 🏆
👏👏👏👏👏👏
Of course, I can imagine very little compared to him, but I mean his puzzles are always stratospherically fascinating for me to solve. They are much more than just systematically innovative.
I love how Simon can immediately see that a V- clue between two cells _in a row with only 5 cells in_ must be a 1-4 pair or a 2-3 pair, and then looks at a row that has 8 cells in and starts to doubt himself 😅
Probably due to the domino mindset that V and X clues puts you in, however the missing cells will throw your mind for a bend. Nothing to complicated though to make the puzzle overly complicated. Great puzzle and great job Simon!
With the colouring trick I managed to solve it, I used green for one digit, red for two, yellow for three and blue for four digits. That way I could count my digits in rows, columns, and boxes giving me a few more colours. Really enjoyed this braintwister.
Just a small thing at 33:58 replace one of ABCD with the 5 for the center marking. Still a total of four digits, and very clear which one is placed. Something to consider for another time?
Pesky moth got to your rules too, glad you were able to stitch them back together! (Thank you for making the original video 'unlisted' so those of us with notifications turned on still got to see it, and could see the reason why it was taken down. I think that's by far the best way to deal with such a situation and it's less jarring than finding the video has just been deleted.) Anyway excellent puzzle, excellent solve, just wanted to show some appreciation, praise the algorithm 🙌🙌
I really appreciate the birthday shot out it really meant a lot to me. Amazing solve!
Happy birthday!
I wouldn't be surprised if the Solved Checker just knows "these cells should contain one value of this and the others shouldn't be filled" and the notation we use it just for our aid than as needed for the check. [I could test this by entering the solution without the red cells but... can't be bothered ;) ]
There have been other puzzles featuring Schrödinger cells, and the answer check has relied on the cells with single digits being filled in correctly and any cells with multiple values _not_ having a single large digit in, they can have any pencil marks you like or be left blank.
Yeah, it only checks the cells with single-digit numbers. That comes up sometimes with fillominos that have regions larger than size 9.
I had the checkmark appear without filling the red cells. It surprised me. I then went back and filled in the remaining red cells I had left in box 9, as I am a bit OCD.
I loved solving this. The logic around how many extra numbers are in one cell is wonderful, here's hoping we see more puzzles like this in the future!
*SPOILER ALERT* - This puzzle is a work of art.
Algorithm boost. This was a great puzzle and I appreciated the speech bubble at 29:00 :D
I didn’t notice the speech bubble until I read this comment. Whenever Simon makes a mark I don’t understand, I go back and pause the video to see why I don’t follow the logic. Luckily I concluded I was seeing it right and knew he’d catch it later.
Loved this. Not difficult at all once you see the trick of colouring the cells that must contain only one digit, but with some very lovely logic along the way. Thank you both Simon and setter.
A Michael classic... absolute masterpiece!
**this is a kind comment to counteract the punishing CZcams algorithm**
Yet another genius creation from Michael. The man is on fire!
I feel like the stated assumption that the four dots in box 7 must be a continuous sequence of 5 overlapping itself at the ends isn't necessarily true in a vacuum-since that box has two missing cells there can be two cells with double identities, so why would something like the following not just as valid if that pattern were to appear in a different puzzle with this ruleset?
.47.|..5..
..8..|.69.
(Indeed if not for the V clue it would be possible to go completely noncontinuous, like
.17.|..2..
..8..|.39.)
or even
.18.|..2..
.49.|..3..
True, I think you'd need to first conclude there's only 1 extra digit in those 4 cells. Which I remember doing because I somehow proved r8c1 has 2 digits and then there's only space for 1 more extra digit in that box.
Yeah, I think Simon avoids full "unlucky oversight" status in that the mistaken assumption doesn't taint the solve path, since ultimately he narrowed it down to a single double-fill cell with the shading logic before using that assumption for anything but hypothetical musings
@@HunterJE True, yeah. By the time he actually uses it, he'd have the information to conclude it. And of course Simon would have seen it.
That was very neat thanks. Sometimes I think these "oddities" score more highly in terms of creativity than actual puzzling enjoyment, but this was a fun solve.
There were two things I saw that I thought really helped solve this puzzle.
He was doing the right thing with coloring the puzzle to determine which ones were the multiple number ones, but he should've used different colors for different amounts, instead of adding letters. I used green for normal, grey if I thought it could be a multiple, then I used purple, red, and orange for 2,3,4 respectively. It made solving the puzzle easier at a glance, rather than the letters.
The other thing was, early in his coloring, he missed the ramifications of how the multi number squares affected the rows and columns. If you can isolate all the multi number boxes, the rest can be deduced fairly easily.
Fun puzzle overall.
Just wanting to say thanks again. Have been watching the channel for two years now and it does reliably help me sleep at night 😊
This was fantastic. I normally shy away from puzzles that are just too weird in appearance, but having watched you solve this, I see that it is doable and very fun! Thanks, Simon!
This puzzle was so cool, and the first time I've solved one of these without having to watch you do most of it haha
Thanks for uploading a new version of this fantastic puzzle!
That was a fun puzzle! I almost gave up within the first couple minutes because I didn't think I'd be able to make sense of sorting out the Vs when they could be pairs in a single cell or a 5 on its own. Fortunately I kept going and realized the trick was actually not too hard.
I am so grateful for you revisiting that part of the last puzzle, really helped me see how I could have figured it out and gotten back on track. Thank you!
42:17 solve for me! I didn't think I'd be able to do it, but something clicked while watching the rules portion of the video and I just had to try at that point. Very enjoyable puzzle, looking forward to watching the video now!
Loved it! What a lovely new addition to the variants of sudoku.
I was doing fine, till the end. When you explained about the 48 pair, I still could understand. But, I saw the puzzle one more time and... "I am so stupid" .... 😅 it simple like that!
Thanks for the solve!
Another truly unique and quirky puzzle from my fave setter :D Great vid, wonderfully entertaining!
i haven’t watched the video yet but i already know it’s going to be a great puzzle as it’s michael lefkowitz!!!
Though they may not have cartloads of drama,
They are quite fascinating as fauna.
Say a hardy "Haloo!"
If you meet at the zoo.
They're the orangutan and piranha.
Hey, Simon said it, not me.
I think it is great that you are so willing to show mistakes of logic from previous puzzles.
Thanks, this sudoku was great fun! And it's nice watching you solve them :)
These puzzles with multiple numbers in a cell are so cool!! I just watched the wrogn fogn one
Thank you Simon, I was stuck since 1/2h, then you said "there are 9 cells in this box", and that was the only clue I was missing to start. Very nice puzzle ^_^
Very creative and fascinating puzzle. Really enjoyed the journey.
I was hoping you'd do this sudoku because I really enjoyed solving it and wanted to see your reaction to the cool idea.
Really enjoyed this puzzle, not too hard, just the right level for me.Haven't watched the video yet, but I colored everything that had to be normal green, and then went to yellow, orange, red for cells that had to have more digits and like that it was colored pretty quickly
astonishing idea and solve, thank you.
Much easier to follow with the correct ruleset. Thank you.
Very neat puzzle, I hope it becomes a genre of its own. Also it worked out in this puzzle, but I don't think that a box of 4 white dots has to be a 5-long sequence in a moth-eaten sudoku. You could do something like [2] [37] [6] [51].
Absolutely Lovely variation.
Great puzzle and a pleasure watching you find the joy and show it to us, as usual for you and Mark, Simon. One interesting possibility that you may not have noticed because it didn't appear in this puzzle is about the ring of white dots. Before you knew how many digits were in each cell, there was a possibility that it was not a five-digit sequence; it could've been a four-digit sequence with a two-digit sequence overlapping in one domino, or two three-digit sequences overlapping at the corners such as a four and a seven in one cell leading around the ring in opposite directions to a six and a nine in one cell opposite!
I really love this puzzle! It's so creative!!
This one messed with my head, but I finished it in 39 minutes and am quite pleased with that 😊😊
24:54 for me - I spent 5 minutes trying to figure out what this puzzle is and then watched your explanation. My time started after watching you.
I like to always watch the video up to the statement "let's get cracking" and pause then to start it myself.
Fun solve to watch. Thanks Simon.
I coloured the 1 cells green as well, the 2 cells yellow, 3s orange and the 4 red. Helped loads, only to make it even prettier than your solution ;)
This puzzle was a great deal of fun. 43 minutes, give or take. After almost a whole bottle of wine (hey, it's friday, eh?) I'm quite pleased with that result ^^
[5/5]: Really enjoyed that! [hic]
What a great puzzle. I really enjoyed this extaordinary adventure.
74 minutes for me. I am proud. This puzzle is simply brilliant.
I am looking for a puzzle where the odd digits have to touch each other orthogonally and form an island. The even digits are the sea and have to touch the borders of the grid. But the search engines across the web aren't helpful. And I'm glad people didn't have to take a mothful to solve this.
czcams.com/video/StSN0FLX1HY/video.htmlsi=jwJ31XEUeXdeR9-s this one, maybe?
I was on the right track but needed Simon's observation at 23:46 to get it out from there.
13:55 for me. What a fun puzzle, loved it!!
definitely a good one thanks for posting the correct rules
It's very fun that Phistomefel's ring is still true for moth puzzles
I finished in 53 minutes. This puzzle was such a joy to solve. The logic flowed very well and was easy to scan, despite having to keep some digits permanently pencil marked. Coloring really helped keep them known in my mind. In fact, I had colored the entire grid in 20 minutes. Great Puzzle!
42:42. Absolutely _delightful_ puzzle. Had a great time with it :)
I didn't expect to do this puzzle, but intrigued by the grid and the ruleset I decided to give it a go. Really enjoyable solve, and not too difficult. 40:53 for me.
I like to imagine that all red cells, being places at the outer borders, are already damaged cloth that will be turned into empty cells next
Got recommended this, so looks like it's working
Great name for a great puzzle
First Cracking the Cryptic Sudoku I've ever solved - took me 161 minutes but I finally did one
Half the difficulty for me was understanding what the rules actually meant, but once I got it I was able to muddle my way through.
Wanted to point out one possibility you overlooked. In box 7, one possible combination for the 4 white dots could have been 5678, and then a 2 and a 3 in the 5 and the 8 box, forming a different run of digits that could have still connected them.
Congrats Michael on your moth-eaten shirt being exposed to the whole world!
It's beautiful!
Woah! You got a sudoku from the creator of "Can of Wormholes"? That's awesome! I think it's a game you two should stream at some point. You'd find it beautiful!
Kind comment for the algorithm because I love this channel.
I've read the description so here I am even though I'M month back on CtC videos XD
29:28 for me. This was another really fun puzzle!
Very fun puzzle!!
Pleased to see this one. Double pleased it is up with the corrected rules. Well done.
Brilliant puzzle! :-) "Wanted, Dead & Alive: Schrödingers Moths..."
Can't believe the things constructors come up with.
Definitely an interesting concept. Once I got my head wrapped around the basic logic of this new variant it seemed to flow fairly smoothly. 39:49 solve time for me.
Incredibly confusing. Also very fun!
This is one of those puzzles that make me think we need another note numbering scheme. Maybe different colored digits? Or bold and italics?
I took a slightly different approach. I started off looking for cells that must have only 1 digit (colored them blue for cold). Then I colored every cell that could potentially have (only) 2 digits yellow, 3 digits orange, 4 digits red. Once I had my basic heat map, I started to work on the Vs and dots to narrow down where digits could and couldn't go. This quickly brought my heat map into focus and by the time I had the 5 in box 9, I had every cell colored with certainty, how many digits would go in each. After that was just sudoku.
What a surprising simple and delightdul puzzle...now to see how simon solved it with only 1 grid ...had to use 2 grids to tally
46:14 for me. Amazing puzzle!
I started on this one and tried notating it, and it's proving very difficult to.
I don't know if this means I just need to keep all the information in my head, and focus more on smart deductions rather than annotating. But I think this one is going to be very very hard for me.
EDIT: It was tricky, but I found a way to track it and figure out where the extra numbers go. Took awhile but solved the whole shebang, and nice to see the solve confirmation just worked!
Algorithm be damned. Puzzles are fun at any time!
27:52, but I had to watch the first few minutes of the solve to figure out how to even get started. Had a moment mid-solve where I realized I'd broken uniqueness but then realized I'd made a simply transposition error that restored uniqueness.
Very cool stuff.
I really liked the use of letters as placeholders, but it would have been so much easier to just replace letters with digits as they became clear - so AB would become 2B and ABCD 5BCD or whatever
Although other work in box 7 prevented this, the circle of white dots did not have to have a 5-digit sequence in and of itself. For example, the cells could have been two overlapping 3-digit sequences, such as 67-8-94-5, or a 4-cell and a 2-cell, such as 49-8-7-65. When the V in that box had not been determined to be a 23 pair, the white dot sequence could have been 26-7-8-93, which means that Simon's thought (at that time) that a 5 had to be on the loop was incorrect. Fortunately he wasn't certain, and so didn't act on it at that time.
One slight logic error in the analysis of the ring of cells in box 7. Until you work out there is one one multiple cell, it would be possible to have, for example (2,6), 7, 8,. (3,9) round it so it didn't need a 5.
loved it❤️
34:15 for me
realizing there are squares that can be filled with only 1 digit is very important
it struck me while watching the solve that it would have worked well to use corner marks for the final values of the over-stuffed cells. a single corner mark already means that digit must go in the given cell, and it would have left center marks free to unambiguously encode remaining possibilities as usual.
but that is typical of me. obsessing over notation while simon is off making big and interesting deductive leaps!
This one broke my brain some, but I was able to solve it fairly straight forward. The key as I'm sure you find in your solve is to focus on the number of cells that can contain multiple digits and then how many multiple digits can certain cells have further limiting the cells that are known to contain only one digit. From there I just whittled away at it a little at a time, but had to constantly tell myself, "this elimination doesn't force this cell because this cell over there can hold that value as a crowded cell" or something similar. See what I mean, it breaks the brain. lol, still fun, though! Now to see how you solved it. :) I think the hardest part for me to wrap my brain around was box seven's loop. I knew it had to loop back, and while intuition told me a hint about it, I didn't fully trust my intuition and had to really think through that logic before I was confident about it. I bet you see it right away and it makes your solve that much easier. Guess I'll find out, now. :)
The accidental pencil marked deduction in row 6 box 4 leading to the 1-2 domino in box 5 and the 2-3 V in box 7 changed the solve path a bit from mine. I can't remember the exact solve path I took, but there were quite a few deductions made from that slip that I know I didn't make until almost the end of my solve...that said, I could still somewhat see the logical path you used, but I'd probably not make that observation without the earlier mistake...idk (Please don't take this comment as a critique as you often see things I can't follow as easily.)
Also, I am glad that you used the (roughly) same logic I used on the loop in box 7. I knew it immediately had to have at least one multiple cell, and used similar logic to isolate which was the multiple/singles in that box. I also had the V clue solved and the 1 by logic put into R8C1 (the multiple cell on the loop R7C2 could only hold one extra digit as the other extra digit had to go into the other multiple cell R8C1 and the R7C2 duplicate digit had to close the loop, i.e. be the other consecutive digit, which 1 could no longer be as we know 2 isn't on the loop). The part I wasn't sure about was the 9 part, but I asked myself if 5 was on the loop, then could 4 not be? I was pretty sure it had to be on the loop by this logic, but I did have a think on it for a good moment before I decided it was logically sound. I love that you see things so much easier at times. Makes me feel daft to start, but then I'm tell myself, "He's a genius. You'll just get there in your own time." To actually get there feels good, then.
Started coloring the grid and broke it immediately... took me a few minutes to realize that of course the Vs with only one cell could just have a 5 in -.-
Very nice puzzle (and I only noticed it because it was visible in next day's puzzle, which really confused me, because those rules didn't quite fit to this grid).
97:03 for me, solve counter 3110.