“We focus all our time on solving puzzles but the YouTube algorithm is one that we have not cracked.” “It’s just bonkers,” he says, still baffled. Anthony has watched it race towards 4 million views. It elicited phrases such as “good grief!” and “that’s quite startling, it really is”, but didn’t really stand out.
“There seems to be a sort of ASMR-type quality to the videos.”īefore the “miracle” post, the big breakthrough came last month when Anthony put up another 25-minute video. “We’re getting an awful lot of emails saying we’re helping people with their mental health,” he says. Anthony suspects something else is happening. Anthony launched the channel in June 2017 but with its spare-room scenery, low-fi design and split-screen webcam format, it looks like it was made for this moment. The Guardian’s resident mathematician and puzzle master, Alex Bellos, also highlighted the channel and set the “miracle” puzzle for his devotees, noting: “What makes the videos so joyous is the constant stream of ‘aha!’ moments.”ĭemand had already surged in lockdown. “I swear to God, this 25-minute video of a guy doing a Sudoku puzzle is the most riveting television I’ve seen all year,” tweeted Dana Schwartz, a 27-year-old Los Angeles-based author and screenwriter not hitherto known to the English puzzling community.
That excitement swept across the web this week, particularly in America, home to 27% of Anthony’s audience. Simon Anthony solves the ‘miracle’ sudoku.
