  We report new tests of the critical earthquake concepts performed on
rockbursts in deep South African mines. We extend the concept of an optimal
time and space correlation region and test it on the eight main shocks of our
catalog provided by ISSI. In a first test, we use the simplest signature of
criticality in terms of a power law time-to-failure formula. Notwithstanding
the fact that the search for the optimal correlation size is performed with
this simple power law, we find evidence both for accelerated seismicity and for
the presence of logperiodic behavior with a prefered scaling factor close to 2.
We then propose a new algorithm based on a space and time smoothing procedure,
which is also intended to account for the finite range and time mechanical
interactions between events. This new algorithm provides a much more robust and
efficient construction of the optimal correlation region, which allows us the
use of the logperiodic formula directly in the search process. In this
preliminary work, we have only tested the new algorithm on the largest event on
the catalog. The result is of remarkable good quality with a dramatic
improvement in accuracy and robustness. This confirms the potential importance
of logperiodic signals. Our study opens the road for an efficient implemention
of a systematic testing procedure of real-time predictions.
