December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: How Many Games of Chess?
by Mike Markley 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

---------- | From: Lefty <netmail!lefty(a)apple.com> | To: <cypherpunks(a)toad.com> | Subject: Re: How Many Games of Chess? | Date: Friday, April 01, 1994 9:31AM | | Received: from relay2.UU.NET by netmail.microsoft.com with SMTP (5.65/25-eef) | id AA25823; Fri, 1 Apr 94 09:50:19 -0800 | Received: from toad.com by relay2.UU.NET with SMTP | (5.61/UUNET-internet-primary) id AAwjtu01006; Fri, 1 Apr 94 12:44:37 -0500 | Received: by toad.com id AA11484; Fri, 1 Apr 94 09:33:09 PST | Received: from colossus.apple.com by toad.com id AA11477; Fri, 1 Apr 94 09:33:01 PST | Received: from [90.1.0.18] by colossus.apple.com with SMTP (5.65/8-Oct-1993-eef) | id AA17501; Fri, 1 Apr 94 09:31:21 -0800 | Received: from lefty.apple.com by gallant.apple.com with SMTP (5.64/27-Sep-1991-eef) | id AA18102; Fri, 1 Apr 94 09:31:18 PST | for cypherpunks(a)toad.com | Message-Id: <9404011731.AA18102(a)internal.apple.com> | Mime-Version: 1.0 | Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" | Sender: netmail!owner-cypherpunks(a)toad.com | Precedence: bulk | | >This is tangentially related to crypto. I've been reading A.K. Dewdney's | >I was glancing through the chapters on complexity, | >computabilty, and minimax trees, and I got to wondering something: how | >many possible games of chess are there? I know that it has to be a finite | >number, but I'm not sure how to go about finding this number. Any | >pointers would be appreciated. | | It doesn't seem to me that this _can_ be readily calculated in any | reasonable amount of time. It's not a simple (realtively) combinatorial | problem: the configuration of the board at any given point limits the legal | moves in an extremely nontrivial way. | | I believe I can get you as far as the second move, though: I make it to be | twenty-one possible openings and twenty-one responses. | | -- | Lefty (lefty(a)apple.com) | C:.M:.C:., D:.O:.D:. | | | I seem to remember from way back in high school that the number of potential moves by the third set of moves is on the order of billions of legal moves. I am also pretty sure that it is not exponential but a factoral growth. I don't think that it is possible to determine every possible game. Mike -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Mike Markley || The opinions here do not represent the mmarkley(a)microsoft.com || opinions of my employer. Attempts to || associate the two are pointless. "I want to look at life, In the available light" - Neil Peart -

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InVisible Basic 1.0
by Blanc Weber 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

<Sender composed mail containing characters not in the US-ASCII set.> <These characters have been transformed into a printable form.> FYI. I am not making this up. I can only imagine how this will = impact society. ~ Blanc ------------------------------------------------- Microsoft Announces InVisible Basic 1.0 Using the slogan "Not Seeing Is Believing," Microsoft Corporation today = is announcing InVisible Basic 1.0, a completely new use of "stealth" = technology in an object-oriented development environment. "We're taking code transparency to new heights," enthused Product = Manager C. R. as she began an impressive product demo. After just five = minutes of moving a mouse around what appeared to be a blank screen, = selecting unseen menu items, placing indiscernible controls on = inevident forms, and typing in unapparent code, the alleged application = was able to access an undisclosed database, perform a series of = unspecified queries and display whatever data it supposedly encountered = in a completely undetectable format. The only evidence that the application existed at all was the use of = disk space and CPU cycles. "And we're working on that for version 2.0," = C. R. said. "The applications are obvious," said "Jim," a developer with "General = Enterprises," a defense-industry supplier that lists its address as a = P.O. Box somewhere near Bakersfield, Calif. "I mean, if you were = developing a sensitive application--not that we are currently engaged = in any such contracts--and you wanted to ensure complete security--not = that we currently have any clients who have any need for such = security--this would enable you to make an application that was = completely protected--not that I am implying that any of the clients = that I cannot confirm or deny we might have would need this level of = data security--from outside intrusion. It also really saves on screen = real estate." Developed under the code name "Provo," the product was due to ship = concurrently with Visual Basic 3.0, but was lost when the development = team moved to its new offices in the D Level of Building 25. "That = ended up being a thrilling beta test," said C.R. . "I mean, if the = development team can't find the product, then it's pretty darn = invisible, right?" InVisible Basic 1.0 is currently available at an undisclosed location = for an unspecified amount. For technical support, leave an ad in the = personals section of the Miami Herald reading, "Marjoe: all is = forgiven. Bunny." You will receive in the mail a postcard of the = Ballard Fish Locks. At midnight, exactly two days after receiving this = card, be waiting at the "G" concourse of Mile High Stadium in Denver. A = PSS representative will contact you there. The password is "blibbett." -------------------------------- | | | | | | -------------------------------- Clear as a bell, the InVisible Basic product development team shows off = its enthusiasm at a recent ship party. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- = ---------- Copied from MicroNews, Copyright =A9 1994 Microsoft Corporation "Never say a humorous thing to a man who does not possess humour. He = will always use it in evidence against you. -- Sir Herbert Beerhohm-Tree (1853-1917) English actor-manager

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PHILIP ZIMMERMAN ARRESTED [NOT!]
by gnu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

This is an April Fools' Day prank. I spoke personally to Phil and he is sitting comfortably in his own house (with the phone ringing off the hook). John ------- Forwarded Message From: Tommy the Tourist <nobody(a)soda.berkeley.edu> Newsgroups: alt.security.pgp Subject: PLEASE READ: PHILIP ZIMMERMAN ARRESTED Date: 1 Apr 1994 14:25:30 GMT Organization: Cypherpunks Message-ID: <2nhasq$ltb(a)agate.berkeley.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: soda.berkeley.edu Originator: hh(a)soda.berkeley.edu Philip Zimmerman, writer of the popular encryption program PGP, has been arrested! He is being held on $1,000,000 bail. The charges against him are as follows: 1) Violating PKP's patent on RSA. 2) Allowing PGP to be distributed outside of the US. I have just heard about this, since I work for the FBI (which is why I am posting this anonymously), and will post more information when I can get it. You may wish to set up a fund to help pay Zimmerman's bail. ecodefence nitroglycerin uzi detonate - -------- For more information about this anonymous posting service, please send mail to hh(a)soda.berkeley.edu with Subject: remailer-info. Eric Hollander takes no responsibility for the contents of this post. Please, don't throw knives. ------- End of Forwarded Message

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Encryption banned in the Netherlands.
by Gary Jeffers 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

conservative liberal fascist left-wing right-wing statist minarchist anarchist SOME DEFINITIONS In the U.S. it is almost impossible to talk sensibly about politics since no one knows the definitions of political orientations. For instance: what is a conservative? Someone who resists change; someone who wants the old order. Conservative is a relative term & does not make sense without reference to time & place. In the U.S. a conservative would be vaguely a right wing statist. In Russia a conservative would be a Stalinist. Also take liberal: In the old days in the U.S., liberal meant libertarian. In Europe now, liberal means roughly libertarian. In modern U.S., liberal means left wing statist. So what is left & right? The dictionary is useless for this question. But, I think I have figured it out. Left & right is based on EQUALITY OF OUTCOME AMONG PEOPLE BY RULES. A left winger insists on rules that will insure equality of outcome & resists rules that might yield inequality. A right winger opposes rules that coerce equality of outcome & may favor rules that coerce inequality of outcome. In the modern U.S., the political majority is made up of right wing statists (fascists/conservatives/republicans) & left wing statists (socialists/liberals/democrates). There does not seem to be any name for left wing minarchists /or anarchists or right wing minarchists /or anarchists. This list seems to have a lot of left & right wing minarchists & anarchists. I am a right wing anarchist. Strange that right wing & left wing are not bluntly defined. A taboo maybe or doesn't the ruling class want the political discussions to make any sense? Maybe if it were made explicit, then the left & right would think they could be left & right & yet, not support the state. PUSH EM BACK! PUSH EM BACK! WWAAAYYYY BBAAACCCKKKK! BEAT STATE!!!! yours truly, Gary Jeffers

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Re: How Many Games of Chess?
by lefty＠apple.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>p.s. i wonder if there is a "irrational" game....one that goes on to >infinity but never repeats itself.....I would imagine not as there are >only a finite number of possibilities for peices to exist on the board >it was an interesting thought whie it lasted.... I can easily think of a trivial one. Get to a point where the only pieces left on the board are the two kings. Roll an eight-sided die to determine the next move for each king. If the move would place the king in check, roll again. -- Lefty (lefty(a)apple.com) C:.M:.C:., D:.O:.D:.

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Number of Legal Chess Games
by tcmay＠netcom.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

On the question someone asked about the number of chess games... My recollection is that a fairly careful calculation of the number of legal games between good players (see Note below) is about 10^140. The number of legal Go games is vastly larger, around 10^700. (Each board position has far more branch positions, the Go board being 19 x 19.) I have a bunch of Go books, and some computer chess books (Levy), but I can't find the calculation referenced. It's not a "plug in" calculation, either, as a lot of empirical cruft (good moves, winning configurations, etc.) gets taken into account. But I think the basic estimate of around 10^140 is well-accepted. It might be as "low" as 10^120 or as "high" as 10^160, for example, but that's the right ballpark, from what I've seen. As a reminder, it is estimated that there are about 10^72 particles in the entire universe. Thus, about 10^60 games of chess for each and every particle in the universe. The situation with Go is even more extreme. Welcome to the strange and exciting world of combinatorial explosion. (Note: If two infinitely powerful agents played, the number would presumably drop, as each would see the implications--chess not being a game of chance--of who made the first move and one side would resign. Lesser agents would have more games, presumably. Even lesser agents, novices, might eventually have _fewer_ games, as the games stumbled into wins earlier on. A novice against a grandmaster should also have far fewer games. as the grandmaster wins quickly. At what point of expertise the "maiximum" number of games exists is an interesting question.) For further info, I'd recommend the many good books on computer chess....I'm sure that some of them sketch out how these calculations are done. I've recently seen several new books on computer Go and computer chess, which technical bookstores and libraries should have. Also, asking on rec.games.chess and rec.games.go might produce better results than here on Cypherpunks. The question might well even be in a FAQ for rec.games.chess...now I'm curious about this and will go check. --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay(a)netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

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RE: How Many Games of Chess?
by Mike Markley 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

---------- | From: Robert M. Solovay <netmail!solovay(a)math.berkeley.edu> | To: Mike Markley | Cc: <cypherpunks(a)toad.com> | Subject: How Many Games of Chess? | Date: Friday, April 01, 1994 11:06AM | | Received: from math.Berkeley.EDU by netmail.microsoft.com with SMTP (5.65/25-eef) | id AA02131; Fri, 1 Apr 94 11:04:58 -0800 | Received: by math.berkeley.edu (8.6.8/1.33(math)Ow) | id LAA28894; Fri, 1 Apr 1994 11:06:45 -0800 | Message-Id: <199404011906.LAA28894(a)math.berkeley.edu> | In-Reply-To: Mike Markley's message of Fri, 1 Apr 94 10:20:55 | TZ <9404011831.AA05066(a)netmail2.microsoft.com> | | | mmarkley(a)microsoft.com writes: | | I seem to remember from way back in high school that the number of | potential moves by the third set of moves is on the order of billions | of legal moves. | | The number of moves in a given chess position is less than 64 | (number of starting squares) times 64 (number of destination squares) | x 4 [number of ways a pawn can promote]. Thus we get the bound 16, 384 | [which can be easily improved] which is way less than "billions of | possible moves". The same computation shows that the number of | possible games of length n grows at worst expoentially pace mr | markley. | | The right way to think about this is to get sharp upper bounds rather | than attempt a precise calculation. A crude upper bound would be | longerst possible game is about 6000 moves [using the 50 move rule]. | At most 2**16 mves per position so at most 10**[192 * 10**6] games. | I'm sure that sharper estimates are readily available. | | I should have said billions of potential states for the board after each move. If you think of the number of initial moves for the starting player its only 16 potential positions for the pawns and 4 for the knights. If the first player takes one of these positions then the second player moves he has the same 20 potential moves giving an potential state of 400 different positions after the first move. After the second move there is on the order of greater than 160,000 potential states for the board. After 3 moves it is greater than 2.56 * 10^10 potential states. I was thinking in terms of states rather than valid moves. Mike. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Mike Markley || The opinions here do not represent the mmarkley(a)microsoft.com || opinions of my employer. Attempts to || associate the two are pointless. "I want to look at life, In the available light" - Neil Peart -

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Re: Anonymous phone calls.
by jamiel＠sybase.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 6:25 AM 04/01/94 -0800, GRABOW_GEOFFREY(a)tandem.com wrote: > I know how to suppress the transmission of your phone number (caller >id) with *67, but I've heard that there is a way to force the routing of One point here- you are not actually suppressing the transmission of your phone number. It is transmitted *between switches* in any case- you are simply suppressing the transmission from a switch to the destnation phone. This is important in relation to the phone company recieving data, as well as the distinct possibility that a clever person could still get this. I got the above info out of Phrack Magazine (_Caller ID Technical Details_ by Hyperborean Menace #45-06, still being issued as I write this). >call through multiple long distance companies. Since the LDCs don't talk >to one another, this should increase the difficulty of tracing and/or >tapping a call. Does anybody know how to do this? Don't know, but from what little I know about the phone company, I would assume using the demand-dial numbers (like 102880) for ATT) from another long distance phone would be a start. jamie

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Re: the rest of the key
by Carl Ellison 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

> >I understand the Skipjack review committee will be looking into the key >generation process at Mykotronx also. The procedures originally proposed >for burning in the keys has some annoying flaws that have been pointed out >frequently, like the existence of both halves in the same room at the same >time, which would be a tempting target for somebody siphoning them off to >a private single-site escrow. :) Various people have suggested that the >two halves of the key could be burned in at separate locations, so that the >only place they're put together is in the key itself; this was not part of >the proposal as we've seen it so far out here. > ..but what of at least the original description which had the key generated by a function within the sacrificial laptop (a PRNG driven by the two key pieces supplied by the escrow agents)? K_i = PRNG( E_1, E_2, i ) ; If PRNG is secret (a high power NSA algorithm), it might be a *truly* high quality one-way-function -- which happens to be independent of E_1 and E_2. No one would be the wiser -- and the NSA's job would be a lot easier, in the event that some chips get stolen or someone bombs the escrow center and its backup sites. - Carl

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Re: patent search service (fwd)
by rarachel＠photon.poly.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Incase you need to sneak up on some patents, you have your chance next week... These guys are doing a >FREE< patent search for a week because they're testing their systems... I thought I'd pass this on to you incase you'd like to look up the finer points of crypto, the MicroSoft-Stacker patents wars, etc... Forwarded message: > From spo_patent(a)spo.eds.com Mon Mar 28 22:56:07 1994 > Date: Mon, 28 Mar 94 21:11:48 CST > From: spo_patent(a)spo.eds.com > To: uunet!photon.poly.edu!rarachel(a)uunet.UU.NET > Sender: spo_patent(a)spo.eds.com > Subject: Re: patent search service > Message-Id: <19940328_162456_spo14_5430> > Return-Receipt-To: spo_patent(a)spo.eds.com > > EDS-SPO ELECTRONIC MAIL PATENT SEARCH SERVICE > PHASE TWO FREE TESTING PERIOD > April 4-April 15, 1994 > > CONCEPT VERSUS BOOLEAN SEARCHES > > Key word searches are now obsolete. EDS' Shadow Patent Office (SPO) > has developed a computerized, concept search method that utilizes the > Internet Information Superhighway. This on-line, computerized method > analyzes input text and compares it against EDS-SPO's database of 1.7 > million US utility patents. > > THE TECHNOLOGY BEHIND CONCEPT SEARCHES > > The EDS-SPO concept search method utilizes massive databases with huge > memory (20 gigabytes), parallel hardware and software, and client > -server technology. The EDS-SPO computer's combination of advanced > hardware and software maximizes fast access to its main memory. > Consequently, EDS-SPO can offer customers a fast, accurate, and cost > effective patent search. EDS-SPO has offered patent searching since > 1992. > > PHASE II TESTING > > The Phase II testing period will occur April 4, 1994 through April 15, > 1994. During this time, each participant will be allowed 3 free patent > searches per day. After April 15, 1994, there will be fees associated > with the type of patent search requested. > > For the Phase II testing period, users may request Subject Search > reports by providing 50-1000 words of text and keywords in electronic > mail format. An Infringement Search report is also available. A user > requests this report by providing a patent id number and keywords in > electronic mail format. A report will be electronically mailed back to > the user requesting either type of report. Each report will contain the > following information for the 50 closest patents to the search criteria. > > o Patent ID > o Issue Date > o Class > o Title > o Inventor > o Assignee > o Abstract > > Any organization or individual researching and/or developing a non- > patented product or service will want on-line access to this powerful > search tool. Areas of potential research include, but are not limited > to: electronics, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, software, petroleum, and > mechanics. > > HOW TO REGISTER > > Prior to performing a patent search, you must be registered with EDS-SPO. > To register, fill out the form below and send it to the following > Internet address: spo_patent(a)spo.eds.com. > > PLEASE ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS > > 1) Company Name: ___________________________________________ > 2) Customer Name____________________________________________ > 3) Title: _________________________________________________ > 4) Address: (street)________________________________________ _________________________________________________________ > City: _____________ State: ____________ County:_______ > Zip: ______________ Country: __________ > 5) E-Mail address: ________________________________________ > 6) Telephone Number:________________________________________ > 7) Fax Number: _____________________________________________ > > When the above information is provided, EDS-SPO will send you > a tutorial via the Internet. > > > CONTACTS > > Contact EDS-SPO by sending an e-mail message to spo_patent(a)spo.eds.com. > > > CONFIDENTIALITY AGREEMENT BETWEEN CUSTOMER AND EDS-SPO > > The EDS-SPO network and system are separated from the rest of EDS. > EDS-SPO agrees to keep all customer information confidential and will > allow only those staff members with a need to know to have access to > such information. Customer information shall include, but not limited > to, search disclosures, customer names, report requests, and any other > written, electronic, or oral correspondence between EDS-SPO and its > customer. >

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