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The Free Internet Chess Server (FICS) is a volunteer-run internet chess server. It launched in 1995, in response to the commercialization of the original American 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. Its tagline is "we do it for the game--not the money". 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 2012 it had about 900 people logged in at any given time, and by 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. Before graphical interfaces, users would see a board created by ASCII characters, with the lines of the board created by hyphens and pipes, and pieces represented by letters. 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.

Once connected, discussion takes place in a wide number of function-specific or subject-specific chat channels numbered 0 through 255. For example, channel 0 is for administrators only, 1 is for general help, 50 is general chat, and 49 is for tournaments.

Players can choose any time control and increment. In addition to standard chess, FICS hosts several chess variants, including suicide, loser's, atomic, wild (including chess960), bughouse, and crazyhouse.

Relay

FICS relays major live 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 players 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. The web-based Lichess platform obtains its tournament relays via FICS.

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. The server and its archive have been used to train chess engines and chess-related machine learning projects, while the FICS code has been used to launch similar regional or thematic chess servers as well as influencing the design of other chess projects.

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. Slater, Derek (1 September 1999). "Knight Moves". CIO. p. 20.
8. ^ "Free Internet Chess Server". gambiter.com. Retrieved 28 September 2017.
9. ^ Bouman, Egbert (2012). "Tribler-G: A Decentralized Social Network for Playing Chess [Master's Thesis]" (PDF). Delft University of Technology.
10. Menn, Joseph (2003). All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster. Crown Publishing Group. ISBN 9781400050062.
11. "FICS Games Database – Statistics for 2013". Retrieved 3 August 2014.
12. ^ Fernández Slezak, Diego; Etchemendy, Pablo; Sigman, Mariano (2010). "Rapid chess: A massive-scale experiment". High-Performance Computing Symposium (HPC 2010).
13. vek/glickman. "Vek-splanation of the Glicko Ratings System". Retrieved 10 May 2010.
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. 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. (June 2008). "A user-interface environment solution for an online educational Chess server". 2008 Second International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science. IEEE. pp. 179–186. doi:10.1109/rcis.2008.4632106. ISBN 978-1-4244-1677-6.
17. Cheng, Isaac; Chico Camargo (2023). "Machine Learning to Study Patterns in Chess Games". doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.30894.52807. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)

External links

• Official website
• FICS Game Database – database of all games played

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