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Broken Secrets by TotallyNormalCat
🕑 Added 2023-12-02 13:00:08 +0000 UTCContinuing the series where Simon attempts requested "brutal" puzzles, he turns his mind to Broken Secrets by TotallyNormalCat. Although it's over 2 years old, it has had only had two handfuls of solves. And it is challenging but it's also incredibly beautiful. The preamble below is TotallyNormalCat's original wording, we have not augmented one dot or comma!!
Play Broken Secrets here:
https://sudokupad.app/jMg44R2tpb
Rules:
When Simon was young, he used to hide his secrets in 9 cell cages. On his 45th birthday he decided to revisit his childhood toys and found out the cages broke! Help him put them together to reveal the secrets of the universe! Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely intentional.
Normal sudoku rules apply. There are 18 cages in the grid. Digits cannot repeat within a cage. Each cage has exactly one partner such that, when combined together, they would form a valid 9-cell cage (ie containing no repeated digits). Along a thermometer, digits must increase from the bulb end. Cells with grey squares must contain even digits.
Simon's solve:
Comments
Ilona Rapp
I did it with colors and letters as well, and then pen and paper, if this is less than that, and more than this... I tried some numbers in the beginning, and it was an easier way to keep track break in, but I wound up switching to letters because my mind was overwhelmed with the translation of one number to another, Simon is amazing.
Kitty Angel
Love these solves :) I'd like to see you tackle No Secrets Here by the_cogito … although maybe it's not that hard (I noticed a couple of people on discord mention times around the 3-hour mark)
Manuèle Ducret
Combining colors and letters did the trick for me, but it was very nerve wracking to wait until the very end to be certain I did not made mistakes along the way. Also I almost forgot one little rule when I finally needed to use it. Loved this puzzle.
Brent
in my opinion it's just that it frees up colors for other things. It's perfectly fine in many cases to use colors as placeholder digits... I'm not a worldclass solver though lol
Is placeholder digits any more powerful than coloring? It really only works if you can’t put any real numbers in the grid.
Paolo De Leva
Magic solve. Please publish this on the main channel. People needs to know about placeholder digits. The power of this technique is widely underestimated. It has applications in many different kinds of sudoku (rotationally or mirror symmetric, German whisper lines, ecc.). This solve would have been a nightmare without them.
