Chess again and why a chess program sucks as opponent

The enormous success of Magnus Carlsen sparked the fire in me for the good old game of chess. As spending more time on chess means less time for other things, I wanted to make sure that my study approach is correct and that the time is used efficiently.

My biggest problem is that none of my friends play chess. The obvious alternatives are to use the computer or to join a chess club. Joining a chess club is something I seriously consider at the moment but I am still unsure if I am willing to commit myself to it. Chess programs I have heavily used in the last years and I would have expected my playing strength to increase over time. Surprisingly, this was not the case and led to a lot of frustration. What was I missing?

I think I have found the answer. I was not playing chess but moves. I saw the computer evaluations and thought “-0.35, oh my goodness, I am lost”. I never really started the battle and missed to come up with a plan. Whenever the computer moved, I too often countered with moves that didn’t help me in the long run. In addition, I didn’t think hard enough and played too fast. When I analyzed my games I put too much focus on the opening and looked for better moves. After memorizing variations I could be sure, of course, that I would run into different move orders where the lines were useless.

Time for a change. I looked up some methods how to plan a chess move and came up with “The Amateur’s Mind – Turning Chess Misconceptions into Chess Mastery” by Jeremy Silman. It’s by far the best book for a motivated amateur and revealed my mistakes very clearly. A lot of things make sense now, e.g. why it’s important to fight for the center and to have the initiative or the difference between knight and bishop. Together with the tactical themes taught by CT-ART 3.0 I can feel a new understanding – finally, after all these years… I am also not so scared anymore about losing a pawn or a figure. Even a pawn down or rook vs. queen it’s possible to draw a game if one knows how. Everything is better than playing without a plan. A bad one can be reviewed post-mortem and improved but if you have none, there is no chance of getting better.

Anyway, a computer is still a computer. Playing against humans is much more fun! I have registered at the Free internet Chess Server (FICS) and you can find me there as ScotchYeti. This is a new, thrilling experience for me and the first game I played was absolutely crazy. I quickly had a big advantage, missed the punch, was in trouble but found a mate-in-one. I will set up a webpage to host the games in future. I am curious how good I really am.

Review: Songs of the Dying Earth

“Songs of the Dying Earth” is an homage to the Dying Earth world of Jack Vance. The list of authors who have contributed to this tome reads like a who-is-who of today’s top fantasy writers and I am delighted to hold this marvelous collection in my hands. As setting and style are predefined, the stories don’t win prices for special originality. However, almost all entertain and some even manage to capture the unique spirit of Jack Vance or to enrich the existing tales. It was a pleasure to roam once more the familiar world and to see some famous authors play with the toy. Each story features an afterword in which the author describes his or her relation to Jack Vance.

The rating of the stories is A (excellent), B (good) or C (didn’t like it).

(B) The True Vintage of Erzuine Thale by Robert Silverberg is a light, melancholic story. A man reflects on his life and has to find a way to get rid of intruders. The pieces of poetry add much to the atmosphere, the extensive listings of various items on the other hand slow down the speed too much.

(B) Grolion of Almery by Matthew Hughes is a dark adventure story about a very special house. It starts quite interesting, telling the story from an unusual perspective, but the events in the end went over my head. I am not a big fan of Matthew Hughes so your mileage may vary.

(A) The Copsy Door by Terry Dowling is a wonderful light story about a sorcerer who finds himself trapped in a troublesome situation. Very clever and very funny.

(C) Caulk the Witch-Chaser by Liz Williams felt unmotivated. Caulk is forced to look for an owl in a very dangerous country. I didn’t understand why he could be forced nor did I like how the story unfold.

(A) Inescapable by Mike Resnick tells the story of a watchman who falls in love with a beautiful witch. This is a funny and smart story, making the connection to a very famous Vance story. Highly recommended.

(A) Abrizonde by Walter Jon Williams is another highlight. Vespanus, a constructor by profession, is stuck in a castle which is under attack. With the help of his servant he invents counter-schemes but the enemies are not dumb. Very smart and very entertaining.

(B) In The Traditions of Karzh by Paula Volsky Farnol of Karzh has to show his mastership as a sorcerer. He has neglected this part of family tradition as best as he could but now he is forced to gain knowledge – quickly. I was turned off by the boring way how the quest starts. The adventures though were interesting, especially the encounter with the pelgrane.

(A) The Final Quest of the Wizard Sarnod by Jeff VanderMeer is the next highlight. Its strong points are the characters. They are on a quest but they are also forced to think about who they are. I find it amazing how Jeff is able to describe believable relationships in just a few words. Recommended.

(B) The Green Bird by Kage Baker is a Cugel story. It’s not bad and the twist at the end is really good but it never felt like the real Cugel.

(A) In The Last Golden Thread by Phyllis Eisenstein a merchant son desperately wants to become a sorcerer. His motivation is led astray when he meets a famous witch looking for a golden thread to complete her carpet. A very well told story with neat ideas.

(B) An Incident at Uskvosk by Elizabeth Moon features interesting characters and events but I had a big problem with the social structures. Usually the servants look for holes in their arrangements with the master and try to cheat them. Not so in this story where we have a powerless dwarf who is trapped in an unfortunate situation. I don’t know how this fits into the Dying Earth scenario.

(A) Sylgarmo’s Proclamation by Lucius Shepard is a dark revenge story with great imagination and gets an A-. What I didn’t like was the sinister way in which Cugel is described and actually I didn’t care much what became of him in the end. The rough way of life is described excellently though.

(A) The Lamentably Comical Tragedy (or The Laughably Tragic Comedy) of Lixal Laqavee by Tad Williams not only has the longest title, it’s a funny story in which the blackmailer has to pay for his crime. There is a dark twist in the end that provides some unsuspected depth. Recommended.

(A) Guyal the Curator by John C. Wright starts very slow with setting up the scene. An effectuator, whose main source of power is a special wand, wants to help a man who has lost his memory. Obviously this man has some insight into the artifact so both begin to look for traces. What begins is an exciting adventure with religious overtones. Recommended.

(C) Stripped down to the bare essence, The Good Magician by Glen Cook is not a bad story. The inferior sorcerer Alfaro has a vision. A bunch of top-class magicians are summoned immediately to investigate the secret, which goes far back into history. It’s nice to meet some old characters, but I found the plot hard to believe and disappointing.

(C) It’s telling that the introduction to The Return of the Fire Witch by Elizabeth Hand doesn’t loose a word about the story. After some pages I felt puzzled and confused – and gave up.

(B) The Collegeum of Mauge by Byron Tetrick is a very light and cheerful story about a man who is looking for his father. He stumbles into a group of wannabe sorcerers who have just started with their training. To be honest, the begin reads more like fan fiction but the second half is fine, introducing an interesting twist.

(A) Evillo the Uncunning by Tanith Lee is by far the funniest story of the collection and in true tradition to Jack Vance. An orphan with a tough childhood meets an intelligent snail and starts the adventure of his life. His naive worship for Cugel combined with the magic skills of the snail lead to unexpected situations. Highly recommended.

(A) The Guiding Nose of Ulfant Banderoz by Dan Simmons is the longest piece and pretty much reads like a Jack Vance story. The keeper of the Ultimate library has died and turned to stone. This attracts many magicians who are still on Earth, among them Shrue the diabolist. Although he quickly finds the library, it’s only the start of an exciting and dangerous adventure. A beautiful story with special care on the characters, breathing life into the dying Earth. It even features a second illustration showing the main protagonists.

(B) The Frogskin Cap by Howard Waldrop is a short piece which shows that even at the end of days someone cares for knowledge. Nothing special but well told.

(A) A Night at the Tarn House by George R.R. Martin is exactly that. Three different people meet in a shabby Inn. Nothing is at it seems and strange things happen. This is a dark, vicious story with great characters. Recommended.

(B) In An Invocation of Incuriosity by Neil Gaiman the sun finally dies. Does it mean the end? Not if you have a backdoor! An interesting story although it doesn’t do full justice to the Dying Earth setting.

Afterword
My first Jack Vance book was Alastor and I have read it many times. On various rainy Sunday mornings I stayed in bed, picked up the book and enjoyed the exotic worlds, the different people and the unusual societies. Later I read almost everything written by Jack Vance, the Tales of the Dying Earth being one of the last but I immediately loved Cugel and his funny adventures and admired the setting at the end of Earth’s days.

The collected stories of Roger Zelazny

Almost unnoticed (at least by me) NESFA Press publishes a complete collection of Roger Zelazny’s short fiction and poetry. As a fan of short stories this is great news! It’s especially good to see the original novellas in print, which got later expanded into novels (“He who shapes”, “…And call me Conrad”).

The first 4 volumes are now available but I wonder why they have been published at the same time. I didn’t plan to purchase them right away, mainly because after 11 months waiting the amazing Songs of the Dying Earth hit my mailbox and I have reserved some time to read this marvellous collection. I was also rather expecting the last volume of the “Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon” (which, according to a webpage, changed into the second-last volume) so it’s not the best moment for the Zelazny collection time and budget wise. However, after checking the prices for the various volumes I was surprised that they slowly became unavailable in Europe. Usually you can bet on at least 30% off the original cover price. Now even Amazon US sells part 1+3 for the normal price and my prefered shopping sites even list the first three as unavailable.

Last week I got the first ordered book (volume 2). It’s a very nice edition with a lot of notes and essays and well worth the price. I quickly ordered the other 3 available volumes before they are sold out. Winter will start soon and I am more than prepared to delight in the imagination of SF’s master story tellers.

And the Hugo goes to…

The Hugos 2009 winners have been decided and none of my favourites won. This brings up an interesting question: I have based my selection of must-read stort stories on the Hugo and Nebula winners. If I only like 2 out of 5 stories and if I don’t agree with the winner – what kind of poor stuff am I about to read?

Maybe 2008/2009 was just a bad year for stort stories, who knows, but I am almost sure that the way how I select short stories for reading is doomed. Relying solely on award nominees and winners does not work, e.g. I would have missed the great story Pump Six. Even as a pre-selection it hardly works, personal taste is too different. This became obvious when I read the anthology Clockwork Phoenix. Some stories impressed me, most didn’t although the reviews were mostly glowing.. It’s much safer to look for favourite authors and stick to them…

A good thing is that short stories are short. Even the longest don’t take more than 1-2 hours to finish. There are enough reviews on the internet from people with different tastes so a combined list with stories-to-read should cover most of the gems. Based on these gems I can find new authors who are worth to be watched.

This brings me back to my current favourite author: Gene Wolfe. His excellent and careful writing makes it double hard for me to accept mediocre stories. The lust for a change has passed and I humbly return to the master story teller.

Sated by Gene Wolfe

Some weeks ago I have started to read Gene Wolfe’s short stories that are in my possession. A progress report can be found on this special page.

Although I greatly enjoy them, the time is near when I have to drop them and read something different. Gene Wolfe has a special style and he has produced amazing stories, however, my mind is longing for something new and there is a rather long list of classic SF and Fantasy novels waiting for me. I will finish Starwater Strains first and then start with some other stuff. Just recently I have ordered the new book from China Mieville The City and the City, which sounds very intriguing. If you have some money to spare you should have a look at the limited edition from Subterranean Press. I am a great fan of this publisher but I can’t afford $75 (or $50 + shipping when ordering through Amazon + EC custom, which in total amounts to roughly €50). Or maybe I could afford it but I rather spend my money in ice cream.

eBooks and DRM (3) – eReader

Last time I looked at the DRM implementation of the secure MobiPocket format. Now it’s time to see how eReader has done the homework.

First of all kudos to the Dark Reverser who has written a python script that shows how the DRM protection works (google for eReader2Html). Without him this article wouldn’t have been possible.

For a brute-force attack to succeed, the number of tested combinations shouldn’t be higher than ~ 40 bit. Even this would require a lot of compute power but it’s manageable.

eReader requires that the user enters two information to unlock a protected book: his name as it appears on the credit card and his credit card number. After some preparation two CRC32 checksums are created and used as input (64 bit). Let’s stop here for a while. The first CRC32 checksum can’t be predicted. Even after some transformation, the possible combinations are endless. The second part is different, we are talking about a credit card number from which the last 8 digits are used. Instead of 2^32 different numbers, this results in less than 2^27 only, so in total there are ~ 2^59 combinations (59 bit).

The eReader file is encrypted using the DES algorithm. An encrpyted key (which is stored in the DRM section of the file) must be decrypted using the 64bit input from step 1. This provides the real key with which the file can be decrypted. Before the decryption starts, a sanity check is done using an SHA-1 message digest.

Different things could be done to attack the protection scheme:

1. Brute-force to find the correct decryption key

As mentioned, not the whole 64bit range is used but only 59bit. This is still a lot – for the Mobipocket DRM protection only 41bit had to be tested. The SHA-1 digest can’t be cheated due to the avalance effect. A slight change will cause the entire digest to change and not only parts of it. I did a test with a simple python script and could create ~ 400′000 digests in 1 second – a brute force test with today’s hardware is completely absurd, even when using a program optimized for speed instead of the python script. On top of the digest creation we have to include the time to decrypt the stored key, which has to be done first and needs time as well.

2. Brute force using knowledge about the encrypted file

As we have seen in point 1, a pure brute-force attack is useless. However, the files are in a markup lanuage called PML and each section is compressed with zlib. If a pattern could be found, it would be enough to decrypt the first bytes and test if the key is valid. Obiously the first character is always a backslash so that the first 2 bytes of the compressed file are 0×78 and 0×9C. Another check could be to look for invalid characters – only printable ASCII characters would be allowed in the file. This would require a decryption of the first part of the file (which takes time). Unfortunately, and that’s the decisive factor, it’s not possible with such an approach to reduce the number of combinations that have to be tested so in worst case 64bit combinations must be tested.

3. Attacking the SHA-1 algorithm

The SHA-1 digest stores a hashsum of the encryption key. The hashsum has 160 bits and no brute force attack is known that would bring down the number of combinations to a reasonable number.

Conclusion

The protection used in the eReader withstands brute-force attacks.

Reading the Bible on the Pocket PC

Last year one of my goals was to read the Bible starting with the New Testament – for whatever reason I didn’t make it and stopped with Romans. I felt it’s time to finish what I have started and this brought up two questions.

Which program to use for bible reading on the Pocket PC

A quick survey revealed three candidates.

• Pocket e-Sword (homepage)
  This program is available for free together with many bible versions (commercial and free). The layout is great and it’s easy to use, however, I don’t like that the presentation is verse-by-verse. If you use a real bible, verses are joined together to form paragraphs, which improves the understanding of passages. Another thing I don’t like is that commentaries are only shown for one verse and not as continuous text covering multiple verses. This makes it difficult to scroll up and down to review things that have been said somewhere else.
  What I really like is the way how bible versions can be compared or read in parallel. Another advantage is that MANY versions are available, including the brand new International Standard Version.
• OliveTree (homepage)
  To be honest, the GUI didn’t convince me. The idea with the buttons in the scrollbar is nice, but they haven’t been placed perfectly. Especially when one is used to Pocket e-Sword, the program feels awkward. Apart from that, the feature list is long and I am sure that many users will like it.
• PocketBible (from Laridian)
  This program was the last I have tested and quickly jumped to the top of my list. The interface is fully customizable, especially the toolbars. Navigating through the bible texts is easy, although I sometimes got lost while switching from one window to another. Footnotes can be turned off to make reading easier. I really enjoyed the feature that allows to find a verse in all commentaries. This will show the first part of each commentary on the selected verse. I would love to see something like “prefered commentary” that allows to change quickly between the bible and the study notes. Maybe in the next version.
  The Gold package – if you can afford it – has everything you need to get started with serious study: different bible versions, the incredible Bible Knowledge Commentary and the Complete Word Study Dictionary (2 Volumes). If this is too expensive for you, choose the Bronze package (you WANT different bible versions, believe me) + the Bible Knowledge Commentary. Later, when you wish to understand the meaning of the original words, come back and order the Complete Word Study Dictionary (2 Volumes).

All three programs are available for free or as demo.

Which bible version to choose

After I have found the best program for the Pocket PC, the old question about the best bible version came up again. In my old blog entries I have finally choosen the ESV but after further studies I decided to reconsider. I was surprised how odd the English is and I have found the advise that the NASB would be the prefered edition for a literal translation although it is harder to read. betterbibles.com gives many examples and shows why literal translations can mislead the reader. As a starter it makes more sense to use a translation that reads fluently so it finally came down to:

• NIV or TNIV
• HSBC
• ISV

The ISV is quite new and would probably be my first choice IF it would have been available for the PocketBible program. The TNIV and the HSBC seem to be on par but after browsing the internet I was surprised that the HSBC seems to enjoy a growing popularity and is respected for the un-biased translation. I glanced at some passages and I think I can’t go wrong with it. It’s good to have the other in the background though together with the bible commentaries to put everything into the right context.

Now starts the important task: to read the bible.