There is an easy fix to avoid bots on Fox. Become pro, then you get a “P” in front of your nickname, then you can pair with other pros, therefore no bots. That’s like what… a decade investment if you are talented.
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To know if it’s a bot you just have to take a look in his profile for the “Current Rank” number of games.
This screenshot is from minifox, the father of weiqihub, this “player” has 25000 games on the same rank, obviously (it’s impossible to play so many games without improving), it’s a bot. In the official client I’m not sure how it shows but is similar to what I showed. Another way (in minifox) is to see if appears as player in the right on the screen, if only you appears, it’s a bot, and if you get game after exaxctly 10 seconds of matchmaking it’s probably a bot too.
I played once agains someone with around 30000 games, and…was human. Don’t underestimate the free time of the people 
It’s usual to have several thousand games there because people play so fast, and play one after another for hours.
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Challenge accepted 
Ah it’s a bummer to realize the automatch is only fast because Fox added bots to it. But i guess it’s working for them because I didn’t even realize it
Edit: I’m 1k now, but now im pretty sure it’s just me exploiting bots. 
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I don’t know but I don’t believe they are (necessarily) bots. I checked again an old game versus such an account. That one has 3000 games, which is normal for a human, and no move seemed robotic, see game below:
In general I don’t feel my opponents are robots, nor that they use AI to cheat (although they could do that in a subtle way, who knows). In my last game (not shown here), my 4d opponent didn’t notice an atari, that was like an 84pt mistake.
However I heard that AI is prevalent at 8-9d.
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one thing I’ll have to say is if fox gives us ai opps, they’ve done a good job at optimising the bots to the point they don’t feel like bots.
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So, I will agree that it wasn’t something that occurred to me until this thread, but there are two things that indicate I’ve been matched with bots:
- Very similar game sequences. It takes two, so could be as much my fault as theirs, but here’s an example that was similar enough to be memorable:
- consistent wait time for automatch
I can’t say either is definitive, but I am suspicious.
Another thing is that I’m still playing a lot of 9x9, which may mean there’s a higher chance of bot match if Fox is supporting such a thing.
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In my last game in person yesterday I also forgot my opponent just played an atari (throw-in), because I was misreading something and got lost in some variations 
I think being tired also wasn’t helping
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