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Setting up Fairy Stockfish on FICS

Fabian Fichter edited this page Mar 3, 2023 · 3 revisions

In order to set up Fairy-Stockfish on FICS to let it play bughouse (or other supported variants like crazyhouse, etc.), follow the below steps.

Linux

Setup

  1. Download or compile Fairy-Stockfish.
  2. Download a recent XBoard 4.9.x source code snapshot from http://hgm.nubati.net/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=xboard.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/v4.9.x, e.g., to xboard-c971f92.tar.gz.
  3. Unpack and cd into it.
tar -xf xboard-c971f92.tar.gz
cd xboard-c971f92
  1. Install dependencies autoconf and autopoint, e.g., with apt:
sudo apt install autoconf autopoint
  1. Now you can build xboard with zippy mode:
./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-zippy
make

Start

Bughouse

Assuming you built Fairy-Stockfish and XBoard-zippy as described above, you can now start an instance on FICS (Note: replace the paths):

cat <(echo -e "guest\n\n") - | /path/to/xboard -zp -ics -icshost=freechess.org -fcp=/path/to/stockfish -zippyVariants "bughouse" -zippyBughouse 2

Now enable bughouse partnerships by pasting set bugopen 1 into the FICS shell. This instance is now ready to accept any bughouse partnership and match offers automatically.

If you want to partner it with a second Fairy-Stockfish, just run the steps again in a second terminal and partner the two instances with partner Guest... where you need to use the name of the respective other instance.

Now anyone can challenge your Fairy-Stockfish team using e.g. match Guest... 3 0 bughouse. All offers should be accepted automatically.

Other variants

To start a Fairy-Stockfish instance for other variants supported by FICS, run something like:

cat <(echo -e "guest\n\n") - | /path/to/xboard -zp -ics -icshost=freechess.org -fcp=/path/to/stockfish -zippyVariants "normal,crazyhouse,bughouse,suicide,losers" -zippyGameEnd \"seek 3 0 u crazyhouse\\nseek 3 0 u suicide\\nseek 3 0 u losers\"

To make it play a first game, create a first seek, e.g., seek 1 0 u, after that it should create seeks automatically.

Windows

TODO