I manage an iPhone / iPod touch owners group and thought it would be interesting to have my team play a vote chess game against one of the iPhone's chess engines. My initial idea was to create another group called "Fritz on the iPhone" (or something similar) and it would be populated by people willing to use that application on their iPhone to play vote chess matches against other teams... most notably mine. I would then challenge that team to a vote chess match and we would agree upon what strength Fritz would be set at and which user in that "Fritz on the iPhone" group would work the engine for that match.

However, it doesn't seem as if you can play unrated vote chess games. I know you can use an engine in correspondence games if it's previously agreed upon and unrated.  Is there an accepted way to do this in vote chess? Does this seem like a feature that would be worth the development effort? I would find it appealing to be able to play vote chess games against engines of all types.

Thanks,

Wes

I see that one member of Chess.com has created a group for himself that only he is a member of. He uses it as a means of being challenged by at least one of his other teams (a real team with many, many members) so that he can play the human team against an engine (Fritz 11, in his case).

My only concern with doing this same thing myself is: Is this considered against the rules of Chess.com? That would make the "engine team" rise in the vote chess rankings for number of won games and throw off other teams that are hard-working human teams.

Is there a solution to this issue?

good question.... i'll have to think about this.

So, someone has created a group dedicated to the use of engines and then other groups can challenge that group/engine to a vote chess game? Links please.

Also, it may already be happening, but is it sanctioned? Is the ban hammer stayed? 

Shouldn't these be required to be unrated though?  Given that there's no provision for unrated vote-chess games I'd question the permissibility of this.

That's true that they're not rated, but they still count as a win or a loss for the site's Vote Chess Leaderboard.That's what I meant when I referred to them being "rated". I should have made that more clear.