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The Free Internet Chess Server (FICS) is a volunteer-run internet chess server. It was organized in response to the commercialization of the original Internet Chess Server (ICS).

History

In January 1992, Michael Moore of the University of Utah and Richard Nash started the first online service facilitating live chess games, the American Internet Chess Server (commonly known as the Internet Chess Server or ICS). The initial release, accessible via telnet, was hosted at the University of Utah, but over its first two years it moved repeatedly across American universities, with additional servers opening and connecting to each other through Nash's Internet Ratings Server. The software was coded, supported, and operated by volunteers. Daniel Sleator, professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, took over operation in July 1992 and improved the code. One of his primary contributions was a mechanism to adjust clock times for the effects of internet lag. He announced plans to commercialize the service, copyrighted the code in 1994, and rebranded it as the Internet Chess Club (ICC) in 1995, charging membership fees.

Sleator's decision to commercialize the ICS was controversial, outraging members who felt the internet should be free and open, or who simply did not want to pay for a service which had been free. Several former ICS programmers saw the move as exploiting their work. On the day its rebranding was announced, programmers created a mailing list focused on developing an alternative, though work had been in progress, using Nash's original code, since Sleator initially revealed his commercialization plans. Several developers contributed, led by Nash, Henrik Gram, David Flynn, and Chris Petroff. The effort reacting to commercialization led to servers in several places around the world and in the United States, with the latter consolidating to form the Free Internet Chess Server, which launched on March 5, 1995. After a few months, it had 1,500 members.

In 1998, the Free Internet Chess Organization (FICS) was organized as a nonprofit organization, although the formal entity was dissolved in 2007. The server is still maintained and administered by volunteers.

FICS never matched the popularity of ICC, but as of August 2014, it had over 650,000 registered accounts. In 2016, 50,000 active players played a total of 23 million games.

In a 2024 book, Peter Doggers drew a comparison between the FICS and ICC rivalry and the later Lichess vs. Chess.com rivalry, with one side committed to free and open principles and the other offering more features for a fee.

Usage

FICS is accessible via telnet and was text-only by default. Whereas ICC has dedicated, proprietary graphical interfaces, several have been developed for FICS, with none having official status. The earliest were XICS and XBoard, with subsequent programs including WinBoard, BabasChess, Jin, Thief, Raptor, eboard, PyChess, and JavaBoard. Though built with pre-web technology which typically requires a dedicated client, there are also web-based interfaces. Users can play using an anonymous guest account or register for an account with a username. Registered users can play games rated using the Glicko rating system.

Channels

FICS has a number of very conservatively censored chat channels numbered 0 through 255. Many of the channels are reserved for administrators and bots.

Some of the more popular channels include:

• channel 1 – general help; questions asked in channel 1 are usually answered by FICS admins or Service Representatives (SRs)
• channel 4 – helping guests
• channel 50 – general chat
• channel 53 – guest chat

Registration is required for all channels except channels 1,4 and 53.

Some channels are used for FICS staff and cannot be seen by regular users:

• channel 0 – the admin channel
• channel 5 – the service representatives channel
• channel 48 – the mamer manager channel
• channel 63 – the chess advisor channel

A user can listen and send tells to up to thirty channels simultaneously. Another form of mass communication available to registered users is "shouts" which can be seen by all connected users who haven't turned shouts off.

Variants

Currently, the following chess variants are available on FICS, besides regular chess:

• Suicide – capturing is compulsory, a player wins by losing all his pieces; the king has no special significance
• Loser's chess – like suicide, but with additional rules pertaining to the king and check
• Atomic – pieces "explode" when captured, removing all adjacent pieces except pawns
• Wild – Nine different variants similar to regular chess but with different types of starting positions, including Chess960
• Bughouse – fast-paced, four player game, in which two teams of two players face each other on two boards
• Crazyhouse – two player version (like in regular chess) of bughouse, where captured pieces reenter the game

Tournaments on FICS

Tournaments are regularly organised or relayed on FICS. The popular Lichess platform obtains its tournament relays via FICS.

Mamer tournaments

Most tournaments are organised by "Mamer," an automated tournament director. Mamer is run by tourney managers who organize and supervise tournaments. Mamer announces tournaments through channel 49 and through tells and "tshouts." Tournaments organised by Mamer range in time controls and include variants.

Other tournaments

Other regular conducted tournaments on FICS include tournaments featuring slow time controls (STC) of typically more than 45 minutes. Two of the most popular of these are FICS Teamleague, which uses 45 45 controls, and the Online Chess League (OCL), which uses 60 15 time controls. Both are team events with teams of 4 competing against each other, and each player typically plays one game per week. In addition, the STC Bunch, or the Slow Time Control Bunch, organised several tournaments with slow time controls.

Relay

FICS relays major chess events. A bot takes the moves in ongoing games and relays them to special demo accounts on FICS. These demo accounts bear the names of the grandmasters playing in the event. Users and guests on FICS can watch the games in progress and chat about the games with each other. The relay has covered every single World Chess Championship since its inception. Other major relays include the yearly relay of Wijk aan Zee, Morelia-Linares and Amber Melody.

Archive

All games played by registered users are recorded by a computer and made publicly available for free. The FICS game archive has been used in academic studies on memory, decision-making, and user interface design.

See also

• List of Internet chess servers

References

1. ^ Stone, Brad (11 May 2006). "Pawns Call King a Rook". Retrieved 10 May 2010.
2. ^ Petroff, Chris (5 March 2009). "History of the Internet Chess Server – Part I". Archived from the original on 13 March 2010. Retrieved 10 May 2010.
3. ^ "FICS 10th Anniversary Celebrations". Retrieved 10 May 2010.
4. ^ Doggers, Peter (2024). The Chess Revolution: From the Ancient World to the Digital Age. Puzzlewright. ISBN 9781454959243.
5. ^ "Trapped in the (Inter) Net" (PDF). The Chicago Chess Player. November 1995.
6. Hurst, Sarah (1999). Chess on the Web. Batsford. ISBN 9780713485776.
7. ^ "Free Internet Chess Server". gambiter.com. Retrieved 28 September 2017.
8. Menn, Joseph (2003). All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster. Crown Publishing Group. ISBN 9781400050062.
9. "FICS Games Database – Statistics for 2013". Retrieved 3 August 2014.
10. vek/glickman. "Vek-splanation of the Glicko Ratings System". Retrieved 10 May 2010.
11. Nagy, David G.; Török, Balázs; Orbán, Gergő (15 October 2020). "Optimal forgetting: Semantic compression of episodic memories". PLOS Computational Biology. 16 (10): e1008367. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008367. ISSN 1553-7358. PMC 7591090. PMID 33057380.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: PMC format (link) CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)
12. Slezak, Diego Fernandez; Sigman, Mariano; Cecchi, Guillermo A. (2 March 2018). "An entropic barriers diffusion theory of decision-making in multiple alternative tasks". PLOS Computational Biology. 14 (3): e1005961. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005961. ISSN 1553-7358. PMC 5851639. PMID 29499036.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: PMC format (link) CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)
13. Picussa, Juliano; Garcia, Laura S.; Bueno, Juliana; Ferreira, Marica V. R.; Direne, Alexandre I.; de Bona, Luis C. E.; Silva, Fabiano; Castilho, Marcos A.; Sunye, Marcos S. (2008-06). "A user-interface environment solution for an online educational Chess server". 2008 Second International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science. IEEE: 179–186. doi:10.1109/rcis.2008.4632106. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)

External links

• Official website
• Scheduled tournaments
• FICS Game Database – database of all games played
• FICS Mac OS app
• FICS Bughouse Database
• FICS interface comparison
• FICS TeamLeague

• Internet chess servers
• Chess websites
• 1995 in chess
• Internet properties established in 1995