Some definitions of ICS Interface Features

• Acidboard: Special feature of LightningRulez that makes the board change colors every 50 milliseconds or time that user determines.
• Auto Keep-Alive: Feature of certain interfaces that assist players with 'always on' connections.  The interface will issue a command to the ICS every 50 minutes, preventing you from being logged out by the ICS for a hour of inactivity (also known as idling).
• Bughouse: Chess variant available at almost all ICSes.  It requires 4 players and is played on 2 boards.  Some interfaces do not support this variant because of the special capabilities required.  Captured pieces are "passed" to the other board where they can be dropped by your partner onto the board.  Refer to Variants for more information on Bughouse.
• Channel tabs: Originated by CClient and used in some interfaces, this is one of the stupider features.  Its main benefit is to help the slower users keep up with conversations at the disadvantage of only being able to view one at a time.  The human brain is wholly capable of viewing and following several different conversations at one time without channel tabs.
• Modem: In the context that I used it in this webpage, it means to establish a direct connection between your computer and the remote host by using a modem.  In this case, telnetting from your computer to the ICS.
• Move legality: Some interfaces automatically check your moves to see if you made a legal chess move.  If you did not, they will not send your move to the ICS.  This is wholly unnecessary in my opinion as it doesn't really help at all in chess games as the ICS will simply make you move again and only hurts you in variant games where the interface will reject your legal moves because it is illegal in a regular chess game.
• Premove: Controversial feature of certain interfaces that allows an user to input his move while waiting for his opponent's move to be made.  When the opponent's move is received, the interface immediately sends back the premoved move, causing no loss of time for the user that has just premoved.  Premove comes in several different forms:
• Automatic Premove: Refers to the capability of entering a move and having the interface automatically play it for you.
• Manual Premove: Refers to lifting a piece up and hovering it over a square, dropping it as soon as you see or hear a move made.
• Simple Premove: See Automatic Premove.
• Semi Premove: Refers to making moves on your turn over and over until one successfully makes it through, hopefully with a lowered loss of time.  Mainly used with the older interfaces such as SLICS and CClient.
• LR Premove: Refers to the interface LightningRulez's version of premove.  If a capture is premoved and the piece moves away, LR will automatically nullify the premove and allow you to make a different move. (also known as a Ghost premove)
  • Anti-ghost: Option in LightningRulez to turn LR Premove off when the user hits a certain time level such as having only 5 seconds left in order to ensure that you don't waste time with correcting Ghosts.  It can also be used to switch to True premove.
• True premove: Any premove that is made will always be made.  There is no Ghosting that occurs.  Best known by its inclusion in some of the earlier versions of the Thief interface.
• Predrop: The capability to make a premoved drop of a piece in the House variants (crazyhouse & bughouse).
• Seek Graph: Visual representation of seeks.  Also wholly unnecessary, uses the same concept behind Channel tabs.
• Smartmove: Controversial feature of certain interfaces that allows an user to simply click one of his pieces and if there is only one legal possible move for that piece, the interface will make it for the user.  In my opinion this is cheating as the user is NOT moving the piece himself.  With premove, at least the user still has to move his own pieces.
• Suicide: Chess variant available at some ICSes.  The point of the game is to lose all your pieces, however some interfaces do not support this variant as one must lose their King.  Promotion of a pawn to a King is also legal in this variant, Checks and checkmates do not occur also.  Those are quite a few different problems that could cause an interface to 'freeze' because of the illegal moves being made or the loss of the King that occurred, or a pawn being promoted to a King.
• TCP / IP: Internet communication protocol that was developed to connect a number of different networks designed by different vendors in a network of networks (the Internet).  It is capable of performing all the different tasks across a number of different networks.  It is also robust and will recover from any node or phone line failure.  Most people today that use the Internet use this protocol. (This is a simple explanation)

Page created: Fri Feb 28, 02:35 EST 2003
Last modified: Sat Mar 22, 22:35 EST 2008