Another very impressive solve! This puzzle is definitely not easy - none of the logic is terribly complex, but there is just so much going on that it can be difficult to know where to look, and easy to miss the low hanging fruit (as Simon found!) I was very happy when he spotted his column 5 error immediately, because this is the sort of puzzle where it would be a real nightmare to have to go back later and find where you went wrong.

Episode 37 was originally going to be a chaos construction, but as mentioned last week, I eventually decided to use a chaos construction for ‘1 Year Earlier’, which freed up this slot. I knew I wanted this one to be crazy, hectic, on the difficult side, using lots of the fruity clue types we’ve learnt about over the series, and also using some kind of weird twist on sudoku rules.
I remembered back to a puzzle I made a year or so ago called ‘Remove and Repeat’, which is a 6x6 but uses this exact same idea. It was a sort of ‘proof of concept’ and I had always been wanting to make a 9x9 puzzle with it. Now, Rat Run episode 37 seemed like a great opportunity. I only started working on it about a month ago, and I liked the break-in that I came up with, using grapes in rows 1 and 9, and the blackcurrant column. But it quickly became apparent that this was not going to be an easy episode to set. Far from it… in fact, it turned out to be one of the hardest.

I didn’t do myself any favours by wanting a very particular ending, borrowed from the original 6x6. This ending is the deadly pattern in the top left corner. My way of solving it is by noticing a kind of weird Y-wing on the outside arrows. If column 2 has 4 repeated (4 on blue arrow), then 6 would be missing (6 on orange arrow). But then look what that does to column 1. You end up with 9 on both the blue and orange arrows for column 1, meaning it would need to be simultaneously repeated and missing, which is clearly too ludicrous for words. Simon ended up spotting a slightly different way of solving it, but it all amounted to the same thing.

So I ‘baked in’ this deadly pattern of 7 cells in the top left, and then went about setting the rest, making sure to never disrupt that deadly pattern. I have done this sort of thing in puzzles many times before, including Rat Run 10, but never in quite such a complicated way as this. The first big problem was finding a fill of the grid which didn’t break the blue and orange arrows… over and over again things would keep breaking. I also was very keen to have a 555 segment on the 15-line, and this limited things a lot too. But even when I had solved that problem and found a valid fill of the grid, clueing it was much much harder than I expected. Fruit clues always seemed to just provide a couple of small deductions here and there, but were never really powerful enough to drive things forward in the way that they might in a regular sudoku. The ‘Remove and Repeat’ rule by its nature just adds a bit more flexibility and ambiguity, meaning it is more difficult to make concrete deductions. What this means is that you end up needing way more fruit clues than usual. So I ended up very much getting my wish of it being a hectic and busy grid - perhaps even more than I intended haha. Towards the end of the solve path though, I just kept finding it almost impossible to place any useful bits of fruit anywhere that would help things progress… I kept reaching impasses over and over again. So in the end I had to include the forbidden doors too, and also the two fruit clues outside the grid that helped things flow. The latter irked me a bit, but another part of me found them a slightly amusing, so I kept them :)

This puzzle juxtaposes quite nicely with next week’s, which is an entirely different kettle of fish, but one which I’m very fond of.

Some days Simon does the sudoku, other days the sudoku does Simon.

Simon:
> Does a series called "Rat Run".
> Refers to the eponymous rodents as "mice".

Simon will be Simon, I guess.

Waited for eternity for simon to resolve the 1248 sequence

I typically only watch Simon when his solve is an hour or more, which tells me that it is too difficult for me to solve.

This solve is illustrates why I love Simon. His brain thinks at such a high level, that he is unable to see any "low hanging fruit". As he is quickly finding the logic that I never could, I want to "yell at the screen" about the additional "low logic" that I see.

That make me feel "really smart", when all that I am doing is, picking up the scraps that fell off the tree.

Rock on Simon!

Whew, what a relief. I was so worried when Simon put in those 6789 in r23c5, and even more so when he used that to put in that double-5. Thank goodness that Simon got suspicious as well.
Now back to the video to wait until Simon finally sees that obvious 1248 black dot sequence...

Zoe was the granddaughter’s name if I remember rightly (Elliott complimented that the name was short and efficient).

Incredible how far Simon could get without using the 1248

I think a huge congratulations is in order for everyone who caught the baba is you stream. Without anyone moderating the chat, everyone was incredibly well behaved. We all remember what it was like at school when a teacher didn’t turn up to a lesson… it could’ve gone very badly!

We need an alternate timeline series where the rats are experimenting on the scientists.

TOO GOOD FOR WORDS. This puzzle perfectly demonstrates why Marty is a generational talent. Nobody else I know of makes puzzles that can take over two hours to solve but give you something to actively do every minute of that solve. You aren't left starting at a grid for twenty minutes in between deductions. You're engaged the whole way through. Instead of trying to make it hard by taking away information, he gives you information and then challenges you to see the clues in front of you and figure out what they mean and the complex ways they interact. It's just so good.

One aspect that I love from these puzzles, Marty, is when you use the… visual ambiguity, I guess you could call it. X is both “sums to 10” and “forbidden”; > is “greater than” and “go this way”. It's very clever.

Simon repeatedly saying "where is the 5?" was very helpful for my solve - you must patiently wait for him to get the super cool 55 in row 7

My time: 1:24:05

I can honestly say that this is probably the hardest sudoku I've EVER completed, and doing it faster than Simon is a massive surprise. Especially given the fact that about half of the time when I try the puzzles featured on this channel I can't complete them.

I got a little lucky realising the Pink line total logic very quickly, and finding the path to the cupcake certainly smoothed out my path a little bit. Ironically, most of the break-ins that Simon got very quickly are the ones I struggled on and vice versa.

It boggled the mind how someone could come up with something like this, so I tip my metaphorical hat to Marty. I tried creating a puzzle with a unique break in once and couldn't even get close.
Bravo Marty. Simply astounding as usual

01:36:35 Never change, Simon. Finding the repeater in row 5 solved the entire row... it's astounding that he's able to see the most complicated logic (which I never could) but then fail to do simple Sudoku... I love it.

If anything ever happens to Marty Sears, I will never recover! Rat Run makes my week.

I was hard for me to stay focussed, on all the details, while solving this puzzle. I then watched Simon's solve and he uncharacteristically was leaving lots of loose ends.  I realized then, that is was not just me, but the nature of this great puzzle.  Keep them coming, King Marty!!!

Simon's 2nd "YES" at the solve was a voice I've never heard from him before. Clearly pumped about the solve.🤣🤣🤣

Finkz and Phinkz would probably be outraged that, at the start of the solve, Simon refers to them as *mice*!

35:07  nooo that's a three cell segment