Why Did Claude Shannon Build Toys and Machines?

David Senra, reading the book's account, says Claude Shannon built toys and machines because he drew no line between them and his math. After 15 years at Bell Labs he felt stale and unproductive, and a change of scene was stimulating. At MIT he built a trumpet that shot fire when played, handmade unicycles, a chairlift from the porch to the lake, a machine that solved Rubik's cubes, more chess-playing machines, and more handmade robots.

Shannon summed the work up as happily pointless. He pursued his interests with little regard for financial value or value to the world, and he spent lots of time on totally useless things. Information and unicycles were moves in the same game. What other people called hobbies, he treated as experiments in simplification, models that filed a problem down to its barest interesting form. Seen from the machine-enabled future he was already exploring, the machines were not hobbies. They were proofs.