Knights (chess) computer turn not ending

Support KDE Plasma
1

I recently got an itch to try some chess (I’m a really terrible player) and installed KNights (I’m using KDE, so it was the obvious solution to me).
As underlying chess engine, so far I tried both GNUChess and Crafty (from AUR).
KNights always seems to run fine for a couple of moves (although even on “Very Easy” it takes the computer some time to complete the turn, given that I’m using a rather fast machine).
Eventually though, the computer, regardless of chess engine, seems to lock up and never finishes its turn - it’s taking up CPU time and it’s displaying that it’s pondering the next move, but that’s it.
I let it run for ~30min, then quit KNights. That worked fine, btw.,doesn’t look like KNights itself had locked up. OTOH, it happens regardless of chess engine, so I’m not quite sure what’s the actual issue there.

A quick search didn’t turn up anything. Did somebody observe similar?

Also, I’m open to other suggestions for (free) chess software on Linux.

2

Fscking cheating games…

Sorry, can’t help you with chess…I have a 100% chance of losing after my first move. :exploding_head:

3

Try removing Crafty since that is from T AUR.

4

It’s the same with GNUChess. Actually I only installed Crafty to see if GNUChess was responsible.

5

Both GNUChess and Stockfish are working as expected for me.
What happens if you send stop to the engine when you are experiencing this?

6

Well, I noticed something interesting. The issue seems to be accompanied by some weird messages in the computer player’s console output.
First it’s complaining about an invalid move (no reason for that, since all moves have been fine), then it seems to be waiting for an input because it asks whether it should replace an existing log file.
Typing y doesn’t work, typing n at least makes it continue (“file not saved”), although it spams more “invalid move” in the console.

The file seems to be “game.log” in my home dir.