As I wrote WatchBot, I am frequently asked How to write a FICS bot? This is the first of a few articles intended to give the detailed explanation.

It can be also of some interest for people wishing to write a FICS client interface (playing program), and maybe even for those wanting to write some program interacting with another telnet-based game server, be it ICC, WCL, or something else (as far as I know some go and backgammon servers also work similarly).

Second article of the FICS bot writing tutorial. After initial introduction now there is a time to write some code.

We will write very simple (even primitive) bot, aimed to perform a kind of a player registration - it will allow players to join something, and it will save not only their names, but also their current standard rating.

Perl will be used in this example, due to the presence of Net::Telnet library and good regexp support it is fairly suitable for the task.

Third article of the FICS bot writing tutorial. In this chapter, I am to discuss the proper way of issuing FICS commands and analyzing the replies obtained from FICS. I will also introduce my preferred framework.

Fourth article of the FICS bot writing tutorial. In this chapter, I am to reimplement the simple registration bot described in part II using techniques introduced in part III (Python, Twisted and FICS block mode). This version makes far better foundation for complicated multitask bot, would somebody want to write one.

In fact, you are to see some parts of WatchBot core here.

Fifth article of the FICS bot writing tutorial. In this chapter, I am to discuss different methods a bot may use to communicate with players.

To extend my introduction to FICS bot writing I decided to share some code.

The mekk.fics library allows one to write asynchronous FICS bots and utilities in Python. I created it mostly by factoring reusable code out of WatchBot sources, polishing it here and there, extending test suite, and documenting.