Was This Sudoku Made As A Joke!!?
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- čas přidán 18. 06. 2024
- ** TODAY'S PUZZLE **
The return of a constructor we really admire to the channel today in the form of Aspartagcus and his sudoku, Kalimba - which contains a ludicrous set-up on "slow thermometers"! Just 2 stars for difficulty but there are many moments when you'll doubt your sanity when solving this one!!
Play the puzzle at the following link:
sudokupad.app/Bqqp8Fr3PH
Rules:
Normal sudoku rules apply. Reading from the bulb end to the tip, digits along a thermometer must either increase or stay the same.
** OUR DECEMBER COMPETITION & SIMON'S BONUS SOLVES **
100 4x4 Snackdoku pack from the Skunkworks was released on 1 December as our monthly reward. Simon has recorded his solves of all 100 puzzles! Available now on Patreon...
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▶ Contents Of This Video ◀
0:00 Theme music & puzzle Intro
1:25 Simon's terrible day!
1:44 New crossword video today
2:04 Chants Of Sennaar tomorrow
2:57 The 100 Sudoku Challenge: Simon's video solves
3:39 Our best wishes to Nancie
4:04 Rules
5:22 Start of Solve: Let's Get Cracking
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Hi, Simon!
I only published this yesterday, so I was surprised to see it here so fast without me recommending it. Thanks a lot for featuring it and for your kind words!
I haven't watched the solve yet, but I do hope that it made your day a little bit better. :)
Oh, and to answer your question in the title: It was made as a challenge to myself to see if I could make a slow thermo puzzle with only straight thermometers. I had a similar thought when I set Raw Spaghetti. :)
Hi, thanks for this very fun and well designed puzzle. I believe that pencilmarking the thermometers with *min/max* values is quite useful in this case to understand the constraints you imposed.
Another beauty from you! Much respect for how you constantly set!! Wishing you a joyous happy fulfilling 2024...along with more phenomenal puzzles from you. 🙂
outstanding, and so elegant! Crazy that that solves with such a random-looking solution, from such a simple and organised starting grid. Thoroughly deserved feature
Thank you all, I really appreciate it :)
That was a fantastic puzzle! Not too difficult, with a wonderful flow. Congratulations.
Music nerd here. A kalimba is an African thumb piano. If you Google it, you will recognize what Aspartagcus is going for with this construction. Just gorgeous.
I googled kalimba and can see that the thermos look like a kalimba.
Yep! Thumb pianos of various designs have many names in different parts of Africa, such as mbira, sanza and likembe. Easy to play, difficult to master.
Haha another music nerd here and my daughter used to fall asleep to kalimba music, but I didn’t even look at the title before I did the puzzle🙃
Not a music nerd but a father of a 3 year old, so I know the Kalimba from Moon and Me.
I hope you get more upvotes.
I love that Simon looks at a 34 pencil-mark followed by a 2 on the thermo and then moves somewhere else.
this was a fairly approachable puzzle, and that is Kryptonite for Simon.
He falls inti that kind of blindpots all the time : he is sooo eager to pursue some wild quest that when he makes some progress he never tidies up looses ends an leaves either blatant impossibilities or trivial deductions unsettled.
Classic. Also “this cell can only be 4 or 6”, solves for 4 looking at that cell & looks to a 45 pair to justify removing 4 as an option. Classic Simon.
Simon misses so many things I think are simple and obvious, then goes and solves something that warps my mind, without using paper and pencil where I need an entire whiteboard.
It speaks worlds about Simon as a person that his car was towed and his kitchen flooded, but he still records 2 videos for us to watch. Thank you very much Simon, I hope things get better soon! Love your vids, thanks for getting me into variant sudokus
"...some ludicrous ability to be 2" is just one of the many comments that made me smile watching this.
I'm an avid pencil-marker, so I compromised by putting the highest and lowest possible digits on the thermomenters, and reading '38' as 'from 3 to 8'. The narrowing in was a thing of beauty.
Thank you, Aspartageus -- and CtC for showcasing this lovely puzzle.
When Sven added the ability to compress pencil marks (1-9, rather than 123456789), it made my life on this kind of puzzle so much easier. I pencil-marked the fool outta those thermos.
Wait how do you do that?
Finished in 60:04, which I'm incredibly happy about because this is my first CTC sudoku that I've been able to solve on my own.
When I first started watching CTC, I would try to start the puzzles, and even with taking some hints from the videos I never could get very far, so I decided it was better to just enjoy the logic of Simon and Mark solving, and that's what I've done for the past year or two. But Simon said this was 2/5 stars for difficulty, and I thought I could see the break-in, so I attempted it, and I'm thrilled I did. I feel like a little kid that's just learned how to ride a bike.
Thanks to Simon and Mark for teaching sudoku skills in such a great way and for making enjoyable logic videos that so many of us look forward to regularly, but especially during rough days. And thanks especially to Simon today of all days for putting out this video even though you were having such a rough day yourself. I hope things improve for you. Thanks to Aspartageus for setting such a beautiful yet approachable puzzle.
(Also, I'm from the US, but I found today that my internal monologue when solving sudoku definitely has a British accent and sounds a lot like Simon haha.)
Congratulations and well done! Glad you liked it! :)
Can you imagine... I'm not even an English speaker and half my internal monologue when solving is British english! and congrats for solving it on your own!
If you were able to solve this one you should be able to solve one Simon did earlier in December that was compromised of 25 codependent puzzles. I couldn’t find the break in for this one but the other one I was able to solve myself (took me a few hours but I solved it without help)
@@anthonywennersten6295 Oh awesome. Scanning back through the past month of videos, I can't tell which one you mean. What's the title?
I'm sorry you've had a rough day Simon, I hope it improves and thank you for still taking your time to improve ours with these vids 🥰 Looking forward to watching this puzzle, and tomorrow's stream! 😁
00:17:36 for me. I went a bit Goodliffey with the pencil marking :) Loved the puzzle! Kind Comment.
Normally I prefer watching the longer videos but this one is just hilarious, couldn't miss it! Thanks!
30:06 Probably the best time I've ever achieved in comparison to video length. This was a very fun puzzle with some really fun logical deductions somewhat reminiscent of some of the circle puzzles I've played. (Goodliffing helped a lot)
Thhhhherrrrrmmmmmooooss!
Huzzah!
Sorry about your beastly day, Simon. I admire your fortitude in posting two videos despite the universe having it in for you.
We love you Simon!
16:22 was my solve time. What an interesting puzzle, even if a little farther on the tedious side than I would have liked. I pencilmarked the thermo cells with the min/max values instead of the full range and it helped a ton.
That's the best notation in this case. Simon's way was quite inefficient.
I did the same
I'm not sure how to officially get my birthday into the videos, but it's my birthday today and this was a very nice sudoku today. Thank you for these videos every day for the past few years. It's sparked my (any others I'm sure) interest again in sudoku and puzzles. Keep up the amazing work!
Happy birthday 🎉
Many Happy Returns
17:20 for me! Lovely puzzle, coloring + max/min pencilmarks on the sudoku made this one go by like a breeze.
This was fun. I also looked at 1s and 9s, but then once 2s and 8s dried up, I went to town pencil-marking. Rather than Goodliffe everything, I just mark the lowest and highest possible value in each thermo cell. This immediately revealed several easy wins, placing more 2s and 8s as well as some other digits. Once they were fed up and down the thermos, other wins were possible. Before long, I was down to just two choices per cell, so switched to normal pencil-marking to finish off.
@ 9:35 - "nine, nine, nine" - I would have loved it if Alexa had rung the emergency services for you.
@ 22:20 - "3, 3, 2 would work" - no it wouldn't. Why pencil-mark if you don't use them? You've got 2s pencil-marked in R6 in box 6.
@ 31:50 - "This cell is 5, 4, or 2" - it can't be 2 any more. Once you placed 2 in box 7, that option went away.
Although your method was slower, I quite liked it compared to my more mechanical solve.
Sorry to hear about your day, Simon, I hope things are going better! I surprised myself by not pencilmarking this one too much (felt it would confuse me more than it helped), and I think I made a wise choice, as I completed it in just 16:02. Really amazing puzzle, props to Aspartagcus!
Finished in 19:22. Straightforward puzzle.
Enjoyable!
I was 19:33 and thought so too. I haven't watched the video, but guessing Simon did an overcomplication somewhere while trying to explain logic. Happy New Year all CTC family x
loved this one! took me 209 minutes, that 5 on box 3 got me stucked for so long! you got it so quickly that I didn't even understand how you saw it haha
32:50 finish. A fun puzzle, as long as you don't forget the slow rule. Excellent!
27 min. Spent 5 minutes trying to workout how to get a 9 and 1 in box 5. I then had a brain freeze as I spent another 10 minutes thinking I had broken the puzzle as there was no where to place a 2 (in box 5). Very cool puzzle. Felt strange to see high numbers so low and low numbers so high on a thermo.
i think this might be the first puzzle featured on CTC that i've actually been able to solve on my own and it was so fun!! most of them i don't even attempt but this one looked interesting without looking too intimidating. i'm glad i tried it!
What a beautiful puzzle. The start was slow, but super interesting. I am happy that I try it and did it! Thanks for the solve! 🤗
I love puzzles like this, that look like they couldn't possibly have enough information to solve. But they do
Ooooh this looks like another one to try out before watching!
It's a very nice one. It benefits from nonstandard markup, where you'd just put a digits that's lowest+highest it can be, instead of carefully marking every possibility.
That makes the logic really obvious without excessive markup.
I enjoyed your video as always today. I saw the 234 ruling each other out in box 6 but second guessed myself when you moved past it the first time
Great puzzle, great solve. 😊
Another great puzzle and I managed to do it in around the hour. Many thanks.
Took me 75:23 . Usually a CtC video that's this long means I'll get stuck, but this puzzle looked incredibly friendly, so I decided to try it. It was slow going, but I didn't encounter many sticking points. Partly, this was because this puzzle was very amenable to the use of pencil marks as a means to get un-stuck.
An excellent experience!
21:45, some neat jumps in logic, seeing how the various thermos affect each other. Super enjoyed doing a LOT of pencil marking.
I watched this video several days ago, somehow did not leave a comment. I loved it, and I loved the puzzle, too! I solved it before watching the video. Thanks, Aspartageus!
Thanks, Emily. Your comment was not for naught. :)
Wow what a crazy lovely puzzle. And what appealed to me the most was, I somehow knew I could do it. I just need to watch Simon's solve to see how it should have been done.
Finished in 33:57 using centre pencil marks as ranges (had to keep reminding myself!!). Loved the puzzle, was a lot of fun 🙂
Lovely! Thank you for your good wishes. I enjoyed this.
What a wonderful video. I took a double take on your spicy thumbnail before I realized it’s a thermo. lol
36 minutes for me. what an incredible flow of logic!! I kept gasping in delight at the twists and turns. :-)
fantastic!!...I like thermos and the new feature that the numbers can repeat....wicked
Got this one in 37:43, in fits and spurts. I'd stumble on a fruitful line of inquiry and knock out a bunch of cells, then stare a while until I stumbled on the next one. A few times I forgot to back-propagate after filling in a digit (oops). Fun gimmick, I like it a lot!
15:35, this was so fun! Unraveled like a sweater once you get the 1s and 9s.
I got a few 1s and 9s and then managed to get ALL the 2s
This was really fun to solve! I usually struggle to solve puzzle you do but I managed to finish that one!
My finally time was still pretty long at under 2 hours with 3 resets but my final go was a bit under 30min so I'm hopefully in thinking I could do better if I paid more attention to small errors leading to me resetting the board and wasting so much time.
In any case, I'm super happy about that :D
16:22 for me, in which at first I tried regular thermo and had to read the rules again :D
I think the most ridiculous part of this is that there is a 3 on the tip of a 7 cell thermo
22:35 I love thermometer puzzles. This was a fun one. I loved being able to follow the logic as it flowed up and down the thermometers.
I had to try this one and I was very surprised that I solved it in around the same time as Simon. That’s never happened before!It’s my favourite puzzle for a long time.
Thanks!
The only sudoku on this channel I could see myself building.
However Aspartagcus missed a golden opportunity to put a 9 on the bulb of the thermometer in box 4!
Aesthetically it still would have fit within the design of the sudoku to have a 3 cell thermometer all with value 9!
Then to really make the ludicrous joke stick, in box 8 have a thermometer that's just a bulb (value 4), would that be allowed?
20:08 for me. First time I ever did bettered Simon, and under HALF his time!! 😁😁😁😁
Slow and comedic thermos? This puzzle must be the Joe Pera of sudokus 🙂
The British: "We've got a flood in the kitchen. Bit of a disaster. Right, let's do a sudoku."
Late night solve here... sooooo enjoyable and just the right difficulty for me at this time. Very nice brain twister when you are used to "normal" thermos. Thanks @aronlide for this puzzle! And Simon, I hope the kitchen is "dry" by now.
Wow! I crushed Simon's time; that never happens. Solved in 21:14.
On slow thermos i like to use a single center pencilmark to mean the minimum value. helped a treat with this one
I used center pencil marks on the thermos to show the a range and got the minimum and maximum on each cell on thermos. It was a little neater than a full pencil mark and worked quite well
That sounds a really good way of doing it. Hope you don't mind if I borrow it for future solves?
The Case of the Golden Idol would be a very similar and I'm sure equally fun game for you guys to play after Chants. I actually ended up playing through it after beating Chants to scratch the puzzly/detective itch.
I confess, I revisited the video a couple times for clues, but I mostly finished it on my own, and using a different method/order than Simon. Instead of pencil-marking all possible numbers, I only pencil-marked the highest and lowest digit for each cell along a thermo, and I kept that updated while solving the puzzle. Only near the very end did I switch to marking the exact digits which could be in a cell.
I really enjoyed this puzzle, and it’s probably the first I’ve ever done faster than Simon. My strategy was to first thoroughly mark each cell and work with the 1s, 9s, 8s, 2s. After each deduction, I’d methodically work up and down each slermo.
Same here, I'm generally not fast and I suck at scanning, but I've managed to finished much faster than Simon. I suppose that the key was the strategy.
Very enjoyable puzzle. Took me 65:34 on my second attempt. First attempt crashed at ~45:00 probably due to misinterpreting the non-limitations of slow thermos.
That was quite fun as a bit of a breadcrumb trail, if a bit repetitive after a while. 28 minutes for me using a somewhat different technique to Simon - a simple fill in all the possibilities on the thermos and chip away from there
25:56 going full pencil marking on the thermos. Finding the min-max let me find the other cells more quickly than trying to remember the possibilities.
This is the first one I've ever solved quicker than you, Simon - suggest you adopt the Goodliffeing technique 😂 26:15 for me!
Before we even start, this looks like a possible variation on a rotational translation of a puzzle you solved a little while ago on an 8x8 grid - the one with just a 1 filled in in R8 C4 and no other clues that ended up with mostly 8s on a diagonal slightly offset from the R1C1 to R8C8 diagonal- from memory it was called "self-determination" - I played with trying to compose my first puzzle with a different ruleset to produce the same result set and ended up with a very similar thermometer pattern and some symmetrical row/column arrowheads around the diagonal that contained mostly 8s - if I had an email address for you to send you the rules I came up with would happily do so. This 9x9 classical sudoko grid thermo variation looks rather more complex !
Belated Happy Christmas and Best wishes for A Delightful New Year
by Stefan Bura. That is the puzzle that got me hooked on CTC, and made me want to start setting 😀
@@martysears yes - and though it's easy enough to come up with some rules -I'm finding that refining the set of rules down to a minimal set necessary to actually generate the unique solution desired is far, far more difficult - especially when you already know the solution and have to test the putative ruleset as though you don't and still prevent alternate solutions ! I'm in absolute awe of those who are setting these elegant puzzles - and of those who can solve them with pure logic and no trials !
46:15@#6577. This one was helped by turning on the "compact pencilmarks" setting. I did have to get used to seeing spans of digits instead of individual ones, which made scanning a bit trickier, but the slow thermos already made hunting for digits harder anyway, so it turned into a net positive.
I pencil marked the highest and lowest values for each thermo cell & found it helped a lot.
slow and methodical - I got it. I loved this one.
One of those rare videos that has an over 30-minute solve time from the experts, but I was able to solve it on my own. Perhaps I'm learning, or perhaps this was one where Goodliffeing is so useful that I eventually had to get it. But, 26:08 I'm happy with...
Slow Thermos are so weird. An excellent puzzle, and an excellent solve Simon
20:52 Smooth sailing.
28:25 for me-first time beating Simon’s time! (Though I’ve generally had a pretty good day. Hope yours picks up, Simon.)
Extraordinarily fun solve! (29:19)
Please let Mark solve it as well. I’m looking forward to see how he approaches it.
Way way easier if you just pencilmark every thermocell completely!
I thought this was going to be a tough one but I just fully pencil marked the thermos (as ridiculous as that was for some of them) and it flowed very nicely.
This ruleset works better when you Goodliffe the digits. 28:01 for me and I very rarely beat Simon's time but marking all the cells made it a lot easier.
42:18 for me - I couldn't find any system for doing it, just pencil-marking everywhere and eliminating possibilities as to where the extreme digits can go in each box. The centre box is the first to give way
I got thru 1,9,2,8, then decided to watch Simon solve.
Restricting 3 in Box 5 to one row cracked it & I was off to the races again. (Solver 12544)
Sorry for your problems. You are such a fun guy, these sort of things shouldn't be happening to you. To the puzzle at hand, I'm so glad that you found those 1's rather quickly. It took me ages to work that out on those slow thermos. One question, what are "Chocolate Teapots"?
From what I've understood, it's when pencil markings in there cells follow a form of ab-bc-ac, where you essentially know that three specific digits are in three specific cells in any column/row/box, but they can't be otherwise disambiguated, so it looks like it has a purpose, but is actually useless.
If you had a teapot made of chocolate, it would melt if you ever tried to make tea in it.
I used a heat color system for this puzzle, coloring everything by its minimum value, and then recoloring them as I got more info. I forgot to look at nines for a long time and spent time looking only at the low digits for a bit
What is your Gym Routine? 😊 Love the Videos, they are so calming and Wholesome
00:38:52 for me, I was happy to see some of the key points before Simon (though he cleaned up faster than I did!)
Really enjoyed this
Very interesting puzzle, props
Simply fabulous!
Oh my! I actually got many numbers before Simon!!! First time EVER! I think maybe Simon has increased my IQ by a few points over the past year.
27:18 while being a 'Drunken Monkey'. I'm always scared when Simon do a video, but I managed
Amazing puzzle! Looks daunting, but just taking it step by step and pencil-marking heavily left it rather approachable. 13:05 solve time.
Case of the Golden Idol is AWESOME!
41:08 The 9 in r9c1 could have resolved that worrying 79 pair in box 4, but it's no wonder Simon missed it, because nobody puts 9 in the corner.
28:59. Got an 8 on a thermo early in but failed to recognize that that eliminates everything but 8 and 9 in subsequent thermo cells :facepalm: well, managed to solve it, still.
44:39. Took a while to get going, but I pencil Marked the heck out of it and just kept chipping away.
Solved in 34:26, really fun puzzle! Definitely worth liberally pencil marking for me, but nothing really tripped me up too badly.
Took me about an hour... Had the 1,2,7,8,9 in the center box and the long thermo as a 3/4, 4/5, 5/6 triple and the top left corner being a 3/6, so there were two possibilities and it took ages of poking around other parts to finally force it into one possibility.
Despite pencilling along all the thermos to start, after the initial flurry, most of my numbers arose outside the thermos (like the 9 in box 4, the 1 in boxes 6 and 9, a bunch of 2s).
Hey guys huge fan of all the content. How would a person get involved in creating such puzzles
@14:59….sounds like what MacDonald said about Hilts’ plan in The Great Escape
40:16 I'm not sure how much control Aspartacus had over what numbers went in which cells. Seems difficult to force
22:19 for me :) That was interesting. lol
Watched a video about a yume nikki song called 'kalimba' and shortly afterwards youtube reccomended me this video! I see what you did there youtube algorithm X3 Little did it know, I was in the mood for a sudoku solve!
42:11 - That was much trickier than I expected!
I do heavily use pencil marks when solving sudokus. The first thing I do when I start is to put 123456798 in every cell and then I work my way down the sudoku deleting the numbers that cannot be there.
Took me 34:14. I always enjoy thermos, so this was quite fun for me to complete!
The 111,222,3 thermo is the funniest one
I loved The Case of the Golden Idol - very similar in feel to The Return of the Obra Dinn