alumni

Stanford Engineering Puzzle

January 2008

Stephen Quake's microfluidic chips are circuits of silicone pipes, valves and chambers that promise to revolutionize biological research. They can be used for cell cultures, preparing molecules for x-ray crystallography, testing drugs, researching stem cells and a lot of other applications. These experiments often run better and require far fewer materials than traditional methods.

In early 2006, Quake established a foundry at Stanford for making these chips for other academic researchers.

Directions for puzzle

In this puzzle your job is to route the constituents of an experiment from one chamber to another in our fanciful mockup of a chip. For fun we will post (below) the names of alumni who successfully complete the puzzle and e-mail the secret word in the subject line to staff member Marge Kastner. She'll post the first 10 correct responders and every tenth right answerer after that.

You must have Flash installed to run this puzzle, which was designed by Scott Kim of Shufflebrain and programmed by Larry Doyle of Cyberiandesign.

All entries, listed here or not, will be entered in the "Alumni Permanent Record" and count towards Honorary Degrees in Puzzology next June. To check out the degree earners for June 2007 please see the Puzzology page. Every 10th solver will be listed until the last weekend of the month, when the final entries will be awarded the "Weekend of Fame" before the next puzzle page is posted. So keep your solutions coming in.

"Winning" entries

  • 1) Archana Srivivasan
  • 2) Javier Lozano
  • 3) Mark Aragon
  • 4) Michael Connors
  • 5) Kevin Shen
  • 5.5) Philip James
  • 6) Julia Tse
  • 7) Kenneth Newcomer
  • 8) Clark Barrett
  • 9) Linda Knudsen
  • 10) Mark Gundersen
  • 10.1) Kent Anderson
  • 10.2) Paul Fisher
  • 10.3) Jack Chou
  • 20) Willy Hveding
  • 30) Jason Wolfe
  • 40) Brad Davids
  • 50) Ken Rewinkel
  • 60) Jacob Poulose
  • 70) Stephanie Sud
  • 80) Sophie Soyrwoo
  • 90) Stephan Regulinski
  • 100) Barton Evans
  • 110) Duncan Boatwright
  • 120) John Selep
  • 130) Avis Austin
  • 140)
  • 150)
  • 160)

Do you want to try your hand at past puzzles? Go to our Archive page.