chaoticiak.github.io

Last updated . Site-wide stylesheet updates, and a big rewrite of this main page.

Welcome to my site, chaoticiak.github.io! You might know me as chaotic_iak online, or Ivan Adrian Koswara in real life, or Sky in furry circles.

This is my personal website. You can navigate through the main pages of the site through the menu above.

Contact me

I'm open for chatting, but do not just say hello. Tell me how you found me (probably this website), and what you want to ask me. I typically ignore "hi" messages.

About me

Real life and academic

My full name is Ivan Adrian Koswara. (Sometimes I drop the middle name into Ivan Koswara.) My pronouns are he/him.

I'm from Indonesia and was born in 1995. I received my bachelor and masters degrees from KAIST in South Korea. Currently, I am a Ph.D. student in National University of Singapore. I am studying theoretical computer science and mathematics, and I have published a few papers.

During my school days, I participated in numerous math competitions. I was a medalist for the national mathematical olympiad (Olimpiade Sains Nasional) and I was a participant in International Mathematical Olympiad in 2012.

Online

Online, my username is chaotic_iak. (Sometimes I drop the underscore into chaoticiak.) I recommend calling me chao, with a hard "ch" sound (like the English word chaos). But I'm not a stickler about it. I've heard of people calling me "chao", "chaotic", "iak", and other combinations of them.

I'm active on a number of sites; see the contacts above for where to find me.

A story about my username

When I was still young, I was a big fan of the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. Two of my favorite characters were Tails and Cream, and I knew there was something called Chao (Cream's friend Cheese was one).

I already had an interest in puzzles, and I came up with a silly wordplay. I took them together as "Chao" + "T" for Tails + "C" for Cream, with an "i" to make it an English word, and ended up with ChaoTiC with that capitalization. I added an identifier "iak" (initials of my real name) to give my username: ChaoTiC_iak.

Eventually I detached from this backstory, including dropping the capitalization. But regardless of the silly story, I stuck with the name.

(If you're wondering, nowadays I'm a big fan of Pokémon instead. I do still play some Sonic games from time to time, just not as much a fanatic over the series as before.)

Puzzlers Club

One place I hang out the most is Puzzlers Club (PC), which has a small Puzzle Wiki article. It's a community on Discord that started in 2017. (It originated from a previous community of both puzzles and furries, but the two sides were always split with very little overlap between them, so the puzzle side split off and the furry side died off.) As per its name, it's primarily focused on puzzles, but it's also a community with diverse other interests, mainly similarly "thinky". I am a moderator there.

From the point of an outside observer, the name Puzzlers Club is perhaps most known for our logic puzzle contests. We write for 24-Hour Puzzle Championships, as well as several contests on Logic Masters India. Generally I organized these; you can find write-ups about them on my logic archive.

There are several other projects produced by Puzzlers Club (and many more if you count the individual members), such as Logic Showcase (logic puzzle writing prompt) and Secret Solver (Secret Santa-style event about writing puzzles for each other), but they aren't quite as public. Maybe we should help release them more broadly.

The community is private. New members must be vouched for or recommended by an existing member. (In the past, we had advertisements on 24HPC and LMI contests, but we no longer accept members through them.)

Puzzles and games

I love puzzles! I solve a lot of them, and I even write some.

My favorite kinds of puzzles are logic puzzles, a kind of puzzles that rely exclusively on logical deductions and do not use any knowledge of words, history, pop culture, etc. (Sudoku is a well-known example of logic puzzles.) I have written quite a lot of logic puzzles, including several logic puzzle contests. I collect my puzzles in my logic archive.

I also enjoy playing "thinky" games. In the video game side, this means puzzle games that are about thinking through a solution carefully. (Baba Is You is a well-known example.) In the board game side, this usually means solo or cooperative board games.

In the past, I used to do hunt-style puzzles, a kind of puzzles that have no instructions and you have to figure out what to do. (MIT Mystery Hunt is a well-known example of a puzzlehunt; its annual event has hundreds of these puzzles.) Nowadays, I no longer participate in them, but I used to hunt with ⛎ UNICODE EQUIVALENCE.

Furry

I am a furry. I love fluffy and cute creatures, and have a huge bias for Pokémon (at least certain kinds of them). I have a separate website for furry.