Bounced from FICS

[sje]

I hadn't been using my FICS account recently but I tried doing so earlier today and found out that Symbolic had been bounced. Apparently they needed an updated application. Why, I do not know. Everything they wanted was already in the finger notes, the same situation as at ICC.

If your program has a FICS account but it hasn't been used recently, you might want to check to see if it's still active.

[Daniel Mehrmann]

Yep, same problem with my FICS account.

All stuff they want are in my finger notes already, but they disabled my account and waiting for a mail. It looks like they did it automaticly without checking the finger notes !

However, i don't accept such handling. They can do with my account what they want. I'll never enter FICS again. Just lousy....

Best,
Daniel

[WinPooh]

Same with my comp account GreKoChess. After not playing for some months account was locked, and it was required to send email to support team to unlock it.

But, I did not get any responce from their computer-account support during some months! (I sent at least 10 emails to them...)

I got only one reply from guy in common (human-related) support. He said, it is common situation, for they have only one supporter for comp accounts, who could be on vacations right now, etc. etc.

I don't play on FICS anymore.

[sje]

Symbolic's account has been reactivated and the program is playing as I write this.

My idea is to use FICS as the initial public test area for Symbolic's Lisp cognitive search while the program's A/B searcher will be playing on ICC.

I hope to have the Lisp searcher running on FICS early next month. It should be good for a few laughs.

[Dann Corbit]

There is an open source rewrite of FICS:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfile ... p_id=86389

That means that (for instance) chess programmers could start up their own node.

[Zlaire]

Sounds like a wonderful idea Dann. Now we just need someone to make it happen.

[frankp]

http://chess.samba.org/ftp/lasker/

I used to use this one (on four machines) when testing. Not for public chess server but I guess it would do that too.

[Bryan Hofmann]

I hadn't been using my FICS account recently but I tried doing so earlier today and found out that Symbolic had been bounced. Apparently they needed an updated application. Why, I do not know. Everything they wanted was already in the finger notes, the same situation as at ICC.

If your program has a FICS account but it hasn't been used recently, you might want to check to see if it's still active.

A news item was posted back in December of last year about this. Not saying it was the best method but the following explains why the reapp was required.

Code: Select all

1200 (Wed, Dec  6) Important information for computer account owners.

A recent review of the computer accounts shows that most are no longer in 
\   compliance with our rules. The most common violations of our rules are 1) 
\   Using another engine than the one authorized by Computers(*), 2) Missing 
\   information about hardware/software/owner in the finger notes and 3) 
\   Playing variants which the account was not authorized for. In order to 
\   correct this we have decided that all computer account owners will have to
\   send in an updated application stating what engine(s) they wish to use and
\   for which variant(s). All computer account owners should also make sure 
\   their finger notes contain the required info (if you, the owner of a 
\   computer account, do not have a fics handle, please say so in your notes).
\   Computer accounts from which we have not recieved a response by December 
\   31st will be locked. The updated application can be sent either as a 
\   message to Computers(*) or as an email to computers@freechess.org.

[sje]

If they wanted to clean up FICS, they would have done a better job with the same effort by booting every allegedly human account that had scored a victory over a program with twice the elo rating.

[sje]

I've just noticed something with FICS/timeseal on Linux/xboard: the program's per move search elapsed time is set to 100 ms (1/10 second) even for very small true search times. Symbolic's logs use a millisecond resolution timestamp on each output line and there are many times the program responds in under five ms.

Has this "feature" always been there?