icc punishment

[adams161]

I have been working on the pulsar program for some time now and several people now run my bot. The person i work the closest with is fegor who runs 2 accounts but the most noticable is a primarily atomic account known as citychicken. It plays at 1600 strenght in atomic do to a veriety of handicapping mechanisms i have come up with through collaboration with fegor.

In the less than 8 months that citychicken has been operational on icc it has gotten 40,040 games. The challenge of making a bot stable that plays 1000 games a week has not been simple. This summer it was norated due to a bug in adjourned games. For awhile it ran noescape and then the bug was fixed.


Since then its run fine playing i'd guess 20,000 games. But about 2 weeks ago a new bug cropped up with games starting preety quickly i.e. the result command sent while citychicken is still thinking. I had a fix for this based on pulsar of old that played blitz and it was ready to play a blitz game. But it did not get the variant after getting the result command and it tried to play blitz in an atomic game and it hanged. Well speedtrap norated citychiken for this. I explained to fegor in my opinion it was rare and i would look for a fix. Speedtrap reluctantly agreed to allow it to play rated again though the remark was, perhaps owning to the earlier hanging this summer do the adjourned bug some 20,000 games ago, that maybe it was time for citychicken to just play unrated.

I got a fix in 2 or 3 days ago and informed fegor of it. It was late his time. He was tired i could tell. He said he just wanted to go to sleep at the moment, he is in a timezone 8 hours ahead of me. No problem i told him. Unfortunately it hanged again that night while fegor was sleeping. It was norated and the next day fegor sent me a tell. I asked did he install the fix. He bashfully told me he had not. I said get the fix. A bit later maybe a few minutes he said I really dont want citychicken to be permamently norated. Perhaps i should just play unrated tell were sure this is fixed. I agreed with him that that might be wise. He is going to play unrated perhaps for a month to make sure there are no problems.

But in my opinoin the atmosphere on icc is hostile to home grown computer programs. How icc can see a bot that hangs less than a half dozen times in over 40,000 games as unstable i dont know. Not to mention its programmer (me) has been dillgegently analyzing any problems and fixing the software.

I hope to introduce fischer random in rated play on icc and fics for the pulsar program. The prefered interace will probably be winboard f as frank muller is working on improving the original winboard_x fr support. With the threat of any bugs meaning a pulsar account can be permamently norated its not a simple proposition. So i am just writing this to say that while icc in the past has been a freindly place for computer chess developement, to me signs are that it no longer is.

Mike

[jdart]

I don't agree with their policy either.

I have had them state that it is to avoid rating abuse by having people repeatedly match a non-responding program and win on time, but that doesn't make sense to me because if it has crashed (the common cause of a loss on time) it shouldn't accept new matches.

--Jon

[adams161]

i have a fix in place now. but when this happens it plays fine in the next game. so we are typically talking about dropping about 16 rating points, since its not a high rated computer and most opponents are at its rating, every few thousand games.

Mike

[CRoberson]

I've had similar experiences. They also claimed potential rating abuse.
People do other things to get away with rating abuse - they work
as teams on engines. When one finds a weakness (typically in the
opening book), several ponce on it in rapid succession - this has
happened to my engnes.

[adams161]

The idea that hanging say once at long intervals, several thousand games, is rating abuse is not one I easily understand. What i do understand that its easy to track when a bot hangs. Anyone flags before move 10 you check the game. Probably some system of maybe a few checks before they auto norate. A bot that plays thousands of games gets by these checks by 10 or 20 thousand games. Then every time they hange you auto norate and require the operator to seek out a speedtrap admin to explain what happened and why it wont happen again etc can you un norate me.

there is plenty of different types of rating abuse on icc one would assume. As mentioned people working ( perhaps as teams ) to explot a programs book. Word getting out to freinds of the weakness in teh book and the history number to review the game. But that is much harder to detect.

Seems natural yet not ( and that is the point ) that that which is tracked gets the most attention. In my opinion the stats have to be read with some care.

Mike

[BubbaTough]

LearningLemming was frozen out of rated games for a bit on ICC too, for losing a single game on time (processor was busy doing something else so it flagged by not moving for about 20 seconds). I would have understood if this had been happening regularly, but was pretty annoyed to be frozen out after a single event. I can only imagine how mad a human would be if they were frozen out for losing a game on time (say, for example, if they had to answer the door).

Anyway, after I contacted them they turned it back on pretty quick, so it wasn't that bad (besides having to listen to some snotty remarks and warnings which generally I am pretty good at ignoring).

-Sam

[Guetti]

Well, we have a Chess forum, it should be possible to make a chess server. The CCCS.

[Ovyron]

Well, we have a Chess forum, it should be possible to make a chess server. The CCCS.

As long as our games aren't censored and deleted

[adams161]

Hi,

Icc has changed its wild 29 category, seek 3 0 r w29 on icc, to include 12 wilds, 2 shuffle variants and fischer random, 3 set board variants including advanced pawns, power chess, and reversed, the wierd icc wild, 2kings, as well as atomic, 3checks, giveaway, losers and crazyhouse.

I'm in luck with this grouping as now pulsar in the beta, www.adam16mr.org/pulsar.html , can play them all so I am testing in wild 29 tonight. The interface is xboard-960 as it has the best fischer random support. I"ve tested fr in over 200 rated games on fics.

But I got to say it makes you somewhat more nervous as a programmer knowing if it hangs that could mean a norate. ICC's policy is understandable in the sense that they want to monitor the stablity of programs playing to prevent any rating changes were a computer gives up points due to hanging not bad play. but if i intorduce a bug in search were it plays 200 points worse there is no issue. Its only if it actually stopos moving that there will be a forced review of your account.

I've been programming on icc since 1998 and i'm not going to stop developing because of new policies. So I have begun playing wild 29 on the icc, after some initial testing, in rated games, on 'finger threechecksbot'. If it hangs i will have to deal with any logistics that need to be dealt with. I'll cross that bridge when i come to it.

Mike