Creating computer-designated accounts

One of the things that is tempting me towards leaving chess.com for some other site is that in other places, you can, if you want to, play against a chess engine that someone else created.

Here on chess.com, we are limited to chess.com's 4 computers. Don't you think it'd be nice to sometimes play against someone else's creation?

The rules would be similar to those in place on other websites-- a computer account is played by only that computer, and only the creator of an engine can create an account for his program.

I know that certain users have created engine accounts on this site and pitted them against each other. In this particular case, why don't you contact the administrators asking for special permission?

It sounds like a good idea to me. If I wrote a chess engine it would be nice for it to have a place like chess.com to play.

You say though that "...only the creator of an engine can create an account for his program." How do you ensure that? It would be nice so that their weren't thousands of Rybkas out there, but I don't see it being practical.

Maybe all you should have to do is specify COMPUTER in the account name. That would be kind of cool.

playchess.com, I believe, pulls it off. I don't see why we can't. I've contacted a friend of mine who says if chess.com is OK with it he will definitely be down for making his engine play here, and says he'll take care of the automating-the-moves thing. He estimates that his engine plays at 2100+ Elo in lightning, and 1600-1800 Elo in 5-minute chess.

One surefire way (though this works only with open-source projects) is to make sure the person uploading the source code (i.e. to github) is the same guy making the account on chess.com