A few days ago, I kept seeing a tweet regarding some kind of impressive sudoku puzzle. I was mildly interested, but not enough to trigger me to watch a 25 minute video. Then I saw Jason Kottke write about it, and that was then linked to by John Gruber. And as I had some free time tonight, I decided to give it a watch.
As soon as I saw that minimal sudoku board, I was intrigued. It had a single 1, and a single 2. And from that, somehow you could complete it.
It’s not just a normal sudoku puzzle though, there are two extra rules:
- Any two cells separated by a knight’s move or a king’s move (in chess) cannot contain the same digit.
- Any two orthogonally adjacent cells cannot contain consecutive digits.
After about 4 minutes into the video, the rules were explained, and I just had to try this myself. So I paused the video, and found the link to the puzzle. And after around 45 minutes (A rough estimate as I was doing other things at the same time), I finally did it. It truly is a fantastic sudoku.
I still had to watch the rest of the video though, and it was totally worth it. You watch him start with a seemingly impossible puzzle, which he starts to make progress on, and then suddenly it clicks. A fascinating thing to watch.
Watch the video on YouTube, and if you want, try the puzzle for yourself.
I’m now going to see if I can find some more puzzles I can do!