Geek of the Week: Chip Brown of Puzzazz on puzzles, bees and making a clock from scratch

Chip Brown, our latest Geek of the Week, spends his days immersed in puzzles and technology as the chief architect for Puzzazz, the Seattle-area startup known for products including puzzle e-books for Kindle. But his personal life is just as interesting, with hobbies ranging from beekeeping to a playing a challenging variation of Scrabble known as “Clabbers.”

And then there’s the clock he’s trying to build from scratch — and when we say, “from scratch,” we mean it in a way that would have made Carl Sagan happy.

Continue reading for details on puzzles, clocks and everything else Brown is involved in.

Name: Chip Brown

What’s your day job? Chief Architect, Puzzazz Inc.

Coolest thing about what you do: I get to work with puzzles all day, every day, in an office full of puzzle enthusiasts just like me. At Puzzazz we apply a mix of technology and hand crafting to produce really good puzzles. There is a lot of software out there to generate Sudokus, word searches, etc., but it usually falls short in terms of the quality of puzzles generated. For example, in the space of all Sudoku puzzles the vast majority are just not fun or interesting to do.

We develop algorithms to allow us to guide the generation of millions of decent puzzles, sift through them for a hundred good puzzles, and then choose and hand-tune a small number into great puzzles. Then we do a really good job in our software of making the user experience as natural as possible, letting the puzzles themselves shine through. The puzzles come first.

What do puzzles mean to you, and what role do they play in your life? For me, puzzles are interactive art. Someone had a clever idea and took the time to lovingly craft it into a puzzle — something which is a pleasure to unwrap and appreciate. Many geeks like myself shy away from more traditional arts, probably because they tend to play more on emotions than many of us are comfortable with. I do puzzle hunts instead of going to see a symphony, or do a crossword instead of going to an art museum. I should probably do those too though.

Tell us about this clock that you’re building from scratch, and how you define “from scratch.” The “steampunk” aesthetic is big nowadays, but I have always found mechanical contraptions fascinating. You can look at them and figure out how they work, though oftentimes it is a puzzle to figure out what the parts actually do. Many are beautiful works of art in their own right.

I decided that the precision clock was the pinnacle of the art of mechanical engineering — building one from scratch became a goal. I don’t have access to the tools that clockmakers used in 1750, so this begs the question of where to draw the line technology-wise.

For me the obvious choice was to start with no technology at all and see how far I could get. By “no technology” I mean “walk into the woods naked and come back with a grandfather clock.” The number of disciplines involved is amazing: mining, foundry work, lubrication, botany, leather tanning, smelting, metallurgy, metalworking, on and on. I can’t claim any great depth of knowledge in any these areas, but the goal is to learn enough about each to build a clock. Then there are the details about the mechanisms themselves, from how to make a precision screw out of a stick all the way up to gear design.

At this point I can identify copper ore, though I have not collected any real quantity. I can make charcoal and have built a clay smelting furnace for casting brass, though for now I am experimenting mostly with aluminum. I made my own casting sand and molds. I have all the math and drawings for the clock itself done, in another 20 years or so I’ll have worked my way up to a foot-powered lathe. From there I can build a milling machine, and then. …

I could talk about this for hours, but I don’t want to use up too many pixels on your web site. If any readers out there want to talk about it, they can feel free to contact me by email at chip@chipandcindy.net.

In a similar vein, I am building a grandfather clock out of Legos. It is being re-engineered a bit right now so the best picture I could come up with is the new mechanism (at right).

It keeps pretty decent time!

We hear you’re good at the game “Clabbers.” What the heck is that? Clabbers is a variation of Scrabble, kind of like Scrabble crossed with Jumble. The problem in normal Scrabble, when you find a beauty of a word, it might just not be playable anywhere. Either none of the words out there can be extended by one of yours, or your play would go off the edges of the board. This is frustrating, because you have this gem, but you can’t play it.

In comes Clabbers. A play in Clabbers only needs to be anagrammable into a word, hence the name, which is an anagram of Scrabble. This change in the rules makes many, many more plays available to you. In fact it is pretty easy to play several words at once (see below). Clabbers has the added advantage that when you make a play, your opponent doesn’t know what word you played, or even if the play really does anagram to anything. There is a great temptation to just play a bunch of plausible letters and hope your opponent finds a word in them.

This variation makes bluffing more fun and challenges more difficult. A challenge in Scrabble is a claim like: “TURODIA” is not a word”. The challenger wins this one. A challenge in Clabbers is like: “There is no rearrangement of the letters in TURODIA which is a word”. In this case the challenger loses, because the challengee says “AUDITOR”, and there is great rejoicing.

What makes a puzzle “good?”

Just like more traditional art, there are many levels on which I enjoy them. The most basic is simply to have fun solving it. A puzzle designer has to tune the difficulty according to the skill level of the solver. The puzzle should also be visually appealing. For instance, all New York Times crosswords have a symmetry to the blocked out squares. But there are deeper levels at which I appreciate a puzzle:

• How difficult was it to create? Some puzzles are so highly constrained that the real genius in creating them is to suspect it is even possible to make one. For a bizarre and wonderful variation of Sudoku, see this puzzle by Sudoku champion Thomas Snyder.

• How original is the puzzle itself? Many pieces of art are difficult to categorize precisely, they simply are what they are — think about a Picasso or Pollack. Some are a mixture of many kinds of more traditional art. The same is true of puzzles. There are hundreds or thousands of different varieties of puzzles out there, and more are being created all the time.

• How clever is the wordplay? Some New York Times crosswords stand out as having particularly witty clues. Many of the clues in a good crossword are little puzzles in their own right. You have to find the right way to interpret the clue in the first place, then you can tease out the answer.

How did you get into beekeeping? I’m a nature lover, so when my wife asked if I had any interest in beekeeping, I realized that I had no idea how honey was actually made. I had heard all about bees’ complex social systems and communication, so they had always been interesting to me. It ties in with my compulsion to know how things work.

There are other food production technologies which I have tried: brewing beer, making cheese, distilling. But unlike these you really can do honey from scratch in your backyard, and there is something magical about working together with these little insects. You begin to think of the bees (“the girls”) as pets — pets you handle while wearing protective gear. I highly recommend it — it’s fun and good for the environment.

Mac, Windows or Linux? Mac. I started on Apple, then worked on Solaris Unix machines in my early career. Reluctantly I was dragged onto Windows when it was clear that this World Wide Web thing was catching on and that Apple was stagnating. I had completely written Apple off by the late 90’s. Then MacOS X came along, and revitalized the platform. It was beautiful like all Apple products, and based on a rock solid underlying OS. What more could you hope for? I guess I could hope for a lot more, but for now the Mac is, in my estimation, the best overall computing environment.