Anybody else familiar with this technology?
I think I started getting curious about sudoku with this Numberphile video
So I started playing, and I searched for videos like "beginner sudoku techniques", and I was directed to years-old videos on
Cracking The Cryptic - YouTube, covering stuff like snyder notation, xwing, pairs, triples, naked/hidden singles.
Then youtube started recommending their current videos, and y'all, shit got wild. Variant sudoku is not new, but they started putting out 2 videos a day during lockdown, and I think a lot of people got into it because of that. So now I can binge four years' worth of videos all at once and see a time lapse of the fun trends in themes and techniques and fun new rules.
It's embarrassing how long it took me to realize that it is the same guy from the Numberphile video, and he's Simon and he's so fucking British you could die. He lives in Surrey and he has tons of catch phrases, and when he gets stuck he says "Bobbins" like it's a swear.
You can read in the video comments a lot of people with my exact same story. I started by just watching him do the solves and having my mind blown, and then I started trying to play along, pausing the video and seeing how far I could get on my own. And now I can almost do a whole easy one by myself.
The other bloke is Mark, and he did this amazing one the other day. I did not even attempt it. It took him 90 minutes and he almost quit at one point. He does crazy amounts of maths in his head (stuff that literally I would have used a spreadsheet for) and still resorts to using a scratch paper at one point, which he was loathe to do. It's crazy how compelling it was to watch, but dude goes through the entire range of emotions and the solve is breathtaking.
I am obsessed with variant sudoku.
Linear Mode
