Bad bots not allowed?

We are developing a bot with my son for educational purpose, as a way for him to grasp some basic algorithmic concepts. Our goal is to make it reach ~1500 for all time controls. We started with the most basic 'algorithm' (returning a random valid move) and are now progressively making it more 'intelligent'. We really are having great fun!

However since our bot was (and still is) quite bad, it got blocked by Lichess ("This player artificially increases/decreases their rating" banner). Playing rated games won't affect its rating anymore, so there is now no way we can measure its performance variations.

I am wondering if this kind of project is allowed by Lichess. Will our bot get definitely banned if we continue? If this is allowed is there a way to get un-blocked so that we can see its progress?

Thank you

First of all, did u make a bot account?

Yes it is live (@babibot). As suggested by another member we used the 'appeal' function at https://lichess.org/appeal . Hopefully a moderator will hear us out!

You shoul apply for bot account. it separate account type

Typically it isn't very hard to make a bot that can play well against human beings, so there's a huge difference between that and a bot that plays random moves. A randomly moving bot is basically a bot that does nothing (it doesn't get more terrible at chess than that).

The bot called RandomMoverBot (https://lichess.org/@/RandomMoverBot) used to have a rating, but people always used it to farm it or sandbag to it, and there were a lot of complaints about it on the forums, and eventually it got rating banned.

Don’t worry, you haven’t been banned. It is just to prevent others from gaining huge amount of rating by defeating your bot on and on. Once your bot’s performance is better you could you appeal form ( https://lichess.org/appeal#help-root ) or contact lichess (contact@lichess.org) explaining everything and if it is “legitimate” it will be accepted. This isn’t a ban. Just a banner to show that your bot is simply reducing rating and playing random moves.

Thank you all for your responses. I agree there is not much interest in making only random moves but this is how we started out. Maybe we should have waited for a more "advanced" version before deploying to Lichess. I also understand that some people will use it at their advantage to get free points (and this is exactly what happened).

Anyway it now has some basic strategies and is winning some games! So I am confident it will get unbanned and show up as a "normal" bot soon.

Yes I tried it and it doesnt move random. But it cant see forced easy mates like this one.

I think this would be a good next step.

Not easy to beat in hyper!! It adopted me and then...