Browne, Cameron 1966- (Cameron Bolitho Browne)

PERSONAL:

Born June 16, 1966, in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia; son of Ronald (an educator) and Joan (a psychologist) Browne; married Helen Gilbert (an educator), September 14, 1998. Education: University of Queensland, B.S., 1989, B.A., 1991; LaTrobe University, B.C.S. (first-class honors), 1993. Religion: Rastafarian.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Australia. E-mail—cameron.browne@btinternet.com.

CAREER:

Software engineer. Blazer Computer Solutions, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, computer graphics consultant, 1994; Canon Information Systems Research, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, software engineer, 1997-98, senior software engineer, 2000-02; Microsoft Corporation, Seattle, WA, software design engineer, 1998-99; Swishzone.com, Sydney, software engineer, 2003—. Visiting academician at the International Computer Science Institute, 1996.

WRITINGS:

Hex Strategy: Making the Right Connections, A.K. Peters (Natick, MA), 2000.

Connection Games: Variations on a Theme, A.K. Peters (Wellesley, MA), 2005.

Contributor of chapters to books. Contributor to periodicals and journals, including M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, Computers & Graphics, Fractals, and Abstract Games Magazine.

SIDELIGHTS:

Cameron Browne is an Australian software engineer. After completing his university studies in psychology, computer science, and graphics, Browne began working as a software engineer at Microsoft, Canon, and other companies. Browne has contributed chapters to computer books as well as a number of articles to periodicals on various computer-related topics and board games.

Browne's first book, Hex Strategy: Making the Right Connections, was published in 2000. In it Browne focuses on the game of Hex, in line with his personal interest in board games. First developed in the 1940s by mathematicians Piet Hein and John Nash, Hex is a strategy board game where two players compete to connect their playing pieces from one side of the board to the other, preventing their opponent from doing so in the process. The book delivers strategic hints at game play as well as its history and other context-related information.

In 2005 Browne published Connection Games: Variations on a Theme. The book acts as an encyclopedia for a vast number of known connection games. In addition to basic information about the genre, the book provides strategies for how to win at the different games. Browne provides a complete set of rules for nearly 200 types of connection games and gives a detailed outline of what parameters are used to define what a connection game is. A contributor to SciTech Book News noted the "wide range of connection games" Browne covers in his book. Ed Pegg, Jr., writing on the Mathematics Association of America Web site, commented that "it's not just the young that benefit. Brain health benefits from many activities, one of them being puzzles and games. If you want to keep your brain sharp, try a connection game with a friendly human. You'll be making calculations in your mind that no computer on earth can compete with."

Cameron Browne told CA: "My primary motivation for writing is to collate information about topics that I find fascinating into coherent works and hope that others find the results equally interesting. Hex Strategy was an attempt to draw together the numerous writings on the board game Hex made over two years, with my own observations thrown in."

Connection Games was a much more ambitious project involving the study and classification of hundreds of connection-based board games, many of which were previously unpublished. The first stage of this project was to research the many candidate games and identify these with a true connective basis. This screening process revealed some common themes and basic mechanisms that led to a useful definition of the game and a scheme for classifying its members. Given the framework, the preparation of the final manuscript was essentially a process of distilling the key points from the copious notes made on each game, with an emphasis on their context within the overall genre.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, October, 2001, D.V. Feldman, review of Hex Strategy: Making the Right Connections, p. 347; November, 2005, D.V. Feldman, review of Connection Games: Variations on a Theme, p. 523.

E-Streams: Electronic Reviews of Science & Technology References, February, 2006, Holly Flynn, review of Connection Games.

Journal of Recreational Mathematics, summer, 1999, Charles Ashbacher, review of Hex Strategy.

SciTech Book News, June, 2005, review of Connection Games, p. 7.

ONLINE

Cameron Browne Home Page,http://www.cameronius.com (January 7, 2008), author biography.

Mathematics Association of America Web site,http://www.maa.org/ (March 28, 2005), Ed Pegg, Jr., "Math Games: A Zillion Connection Games."