icsDrone

If you want to test your chess engine against Internet Chess Servers (ICS), you might want to consider using icsDrone. It is an application that acts as an interface between an ICS and a chess engine. It was created back in 1996 as a way to run multiple engines without taking up a workstation or X terminal. It runs in the background and handles tasks such as creating games, continuing adjourned games, and asking for games when bored.

The program communicates with the chess engine using pipes and a subset of the 'Chess Engine Communication Protocol.' It is also configurable remotely. Although plans exist to make it a library that the engine can link to, it is still only in the sketchbook stage. If you only want to run the engine for a few hours on your local workstation while watching it play, you can use XBoard/WinBoard.

The latest release features a range of improvements and bug fixes. These include a project name change from RoboFICS to icsDrone and a move parser fix. There is now a new option to attempt to configure itself automatically based on the engine's filename, and it can even send a ping to the engine on start-up to ensure initialization is complete. The icsDrone program can also attempt courtesy adjournments for games where the opponent is three minutes behind on time and cannot be flagged because of time seal, preventing other players from waiting forever. Finally, a limit rematch code was totally rewritten with new features, including waiting a minute before accepting a challenge from the same player.