The Ultimate Miracle Sudoku

*** TODAY'S PUZZLE ***
Some of you might remember the original Miracle Sudoku - a remarkable puzzle with just a couple of digits in the grid. We've seen other forms of Miracle sudoku since Mitchell Lee's original but today we feature what is surely the most extreme form! The setter is Emre Kolotoglu and there are no clues at all except for a few ? dotted around the edge of the grid!!! Good luck! Play the puzzle at the link below:

Rules:
Normal sudoku rules apply. Clues outside the grid represent any positive integers and they show the sum of the first X digits from that direction where X is the first digit and they also show the sum of the digits sandwiched between the 1 and the 9 in that row/column.

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[emrekolotoglu]

Thank you so much Simon for featuring my puzzle again, for this great solve, and for your very kind words. I am very happy to see that you enjoyed solving this puzzle.

[ediablo]

Rarely talked about sudoku-ism I love:
- "Everything is fitting together nicely" = "How annoying!"
- "And that breaks" = "How wonderful!"

[SjorsHoukes]

46:20 “This is huge. This is huge! Well, when I say huge, I mean modestly interesting.”
53:38 “everything seems to be order, doesn’t it? That’s very annoying.”
Oh Simon, you always give me a good chuckle. 😄

[crashtextdummie]

I am frequently in awe with setters featured on this channel, but rarely as much as this.

An absolute masterpiece. An a pleasure to watch Simon solve it.

[Playmaker]

As a "decent" setter, I was at one point thinking about some ideas for a puzzle with the same "double duty clues" concept, and when I saw this puzzle on LMG I was totally bedazzled because not only it looks so minimal but also it's all ambiguous clues (!). I kept shaking my head throughout the solve and when I finished it, I talked to myself "man oh man, what if Simon was actually thinking about giving this one a go as well, he would be so shocked just like I was here".
I'll say this again: take a bow Emre, wonderful and staggering construction with juicy logics all over the place 🙇

[ojxxrkd]

"15 sandwiches, I think they grow on trees" another one for the Simon Out Of Context compilation

[bluerizlagirl]

The arithmomaniacs among you might care to know that out of the 362880 possible different Sudoku rows/columns, there are 4772 which have equal X-sum and sandwich sums; and among those, just 24 have equal X-sums from both ends and sandwich sums.

Also, the sight of nine nested for() loops is truly an accursed one, and I am going to have nightmares about this. But still - _it's for Sudoku_

[ChrisRemo]

I laughed out loud when I loaded this puzzle. Are you kidding!? Looking forward to this one.

[jeffreysugar]

I will never watch this video until i solve this puzzle myself. I will see you in a decade god willing.

[afrayedknot]

An easier way to see the break-in (imo) is to figure out that 8 cannot be on a ‘?’-adjacent cell (min x sum is 36 when x=8), and therefore there’s a 189 triple in row 1. Since it must be a non zero sum, 8 must be in the middle

[SnowTheJamMan]

I thought this was an April fools joke puzzle when i saw it on LMD... wow i'm very excited to watch this

[markbennet]

This is yet another insanely elegant discovery - no digits and nine question-marks sets a challenge to constructors ... and the constraints here actually work interestingly together. The next miracle may well be truly brutal.

[celestia]

every now and then a puzzle comes along that completely challenges everything that I thought could be possible in a sudoku; this is definitely one of those puzzles. what an incredible construction

[NijiRanger]

What an absolutely extraordinary and bonkers puzzle. I showed the blank grid to my family and they just laughed at me.

[Sam_on_YouTube]

That may be the smallest amount of information I've ever seen on a puzzle with a unique solution.

[JayBea]

I solved this in just over 2 hours, which is *amazing* for me. By far the puzzle with the longest "Simon Solve" which I was able to do on my own without reference to the video. I loved it, thank you.

[ShakalDraconis]

The idea of 'using up clues' is actually really useful in puzzles like this, where you're trying to figure out where you should be looking next. It would be useful in the software if you could click on a clue and mark it somehow, so you can more easily see what clues still might have logic to give and which you no longer need to keep looking back at.

[deth]

the funny part is where you are 10000x better at this than me, but i see one number youre missing, and i keep yelling it at the screen for 10 min until you finally fill it in.

[pandorah_]

This puzzle is absolutely brilliant. One of my very favourites ever featured. Thanks so much for bringing it to our attention!

[ericpraline]

What sort of a twisted genius is Emre Kolotoglu? I couldn't give up on this, even if I should have done to save my sanity. Some of the logic here is incredible. Simon's brilliant solve is so incisive that it made me wonder how I could have taken so long to spot various things.