PlayStrategy Bots are for:

• Vote game programs (letting spectators vote for the next move to play)
• Game engines
• Cyborg/Centaur games (man and machine teaming up)
• Anything you can think of that can play games available on the site

PlayStrategy Bots can:

• Play casual and rated games with other players
• Send and accept challenges
• Follow and be followed by other players

PlayStrategy Bots cannot:

• Participate in tournament or simuls (unless they are created by PlayStrategy and entries are low)
• Use lobby seeks or pools
• Appear in leaderboards

Who are these bots for?

We have created a random mover bot (@PS-Random-Mover) so that there is always an opponent on the site that can play any of our games. Watch out in the future for additional PlayStrategy bots that will be stronger across our entire game collection. Available bots can be seen here.

We are excited to see the creation of community bots, especially in games where there may not be a common engine to play online against (e.g. Stockfish for chess). To interface your game client with PlayStrategy, use the PlayStrategy bot HTTP API, and the OAuth Personal Token creation Page. If your engine support UCI or XBoard protocol, you're in luck! Download the official playstrategy-bot client and you will be all set in no time.

Frequently asked questions

• Can bots play rated games?

Yes. However players only win or lose half rating points during rated games with bots.

• Why do player ratings even change? Shouldn't the bot rating only be affected?

We don't play casual games the same way we play rated games. In order for the bots to get reliable ratings, we need their opponents to play their best, and that means putting their own rating on the table.

• Is it ok to cheat in a game with a bot?

No, it is a bannable offense. Just like cheating in a game with any normal user. If you want to use computer assistance or play Centaur games, create a Bot account.

Similarly to games with normal users, an exception can be made in casual games, after obtaining the explicit consent of the opponent.

• Many bots will be strong engines. Won't they disrupt the rating system?

Creating a bot requires technical knowledge and we expect that they will remain a minority. As long as less than 0.1% of new accounts are bots, there won't be any visible change to the rating distribution. We'll keep an eye on it.

• What about rating manipulation? One could create a bot to farm rating points out of it?

That is called sandbagging or boosting. You can do the same thing with a normal account. PlayStrategy detects it and bans the offenders.

• Will there be bot contests or tournaments?

Bot play cannot be competitive. No tournaments, no leaderboards, no trophies. Because it all boils down to who's got the biggest CPU to run Stockfish on. Only way we can have competitive engine play is by having PlayStrategy host the engines, and this may happen to bolster PlayStrategy tournaments with low numbers.

• Why can't we use the API with our normal user accounts?

It would be awesome to open the play API for all, and have people create their own clients. In a perfect world, we would totally do it.

But in our world, we have to deal with cheating. It's a real problem, and we take it very seriously.

In our fight against cheats, we have two weapons. The first one is our server, where we evaluate the moves' quality, frequency, and other metrics. The second one is our client, where we gather more valuable metrics to identify cheaters.

If we open an API to directly access our server, then we're losing half of our defences (which are located in our client).

That's the reason why only BOT accounts can use an API for playing on PlayStrategy. It's unfortunate, but defending fair play is our top priority.