Never Be Bored
3 July 2021
Watch the Master Work
Cracking the Cryptic. Ancient Greek Geometry by Nico Disseldorp; Geoguessr with Wilbur Soot; Never Too Small.
Sudoku! Nine 3x3 boxes in a square such that each row, column, and box contains the numbers 1 to 9 exactly once. At some point in your life, you've probably started one, gotten bored, and given up. So you'd think watching someone else do a sudoku probably wouldn't be very interesting, right?
Counterpoint: watching Simon Anthony on Cracking the Cryptic is an excellent way to spend a few hours. I especially love the videos on non-standard sudokus with additional rules, like when two squares separated by a knight's move in chess can't have the same number or the ones where certain groups of squares' digits have to add up to particular sums. Viewer's choice on whether you want to follow along and see if you can solve the puzzle yourself, or you just want to watch the master work. The first video I watched from this channel begins with Simon staring in confusion at a grid starting with only two placed numbers, gradually discovering that the puzzle is, in fact, solvable, and contains the beautiful line "this is like the universe is singing to us."
For another elegant logic puzzle, try Ancient Greek Geometry by Nico Disseldorp—a game that challenges you to create shapes like an octagon or seven circles nestled inside a larger one. Starting with two dots on a blank canvas, you can draw a straight line between any two points or draw a circle centered at one point and whose circumference lies on another point. That's it—a digital straightedge and compass, but no ruler, protractor, or triangle. Good luck!
There's something so lovely about watching someone who's really good at something have fun doing it—that's what I like about the Cracking the Cryptic videos. I haven't played a ton of Geoguessr, a game in which you're shown a street level view of a random location and have to guess where in the world you might be, but I do love watching other people play it. Wilbur Soot streams it sometimes on Twitch, or you can watch one of his videos on YouTube.
I think very few (if any?) of the sudokus Simon solves are computer generated—they're designed by highly talented puzzle makers to be solvable in elegant ways. Plus his videos are relaxing to listen to, very zen. If you like those two elements, you might also enjoy the channel Never Too Small, in which various architects and designers walk through homes with extremely limited square footage and talk about how they've created beautiful and functional spaces despite their size limitations. Two of my favorites are this "tree house" apartment in Hong Kong and this flat in Melbourne.