Chess is a game of strategic thinking and mental effort. Violence is usually absent from it, but apparently, the same cannot be said when robots are involved. A robot player broke the finger of a seven-year-old boy participating in a chess tournament in Russia, according to reports from local news agencies.
The incident occurred last week at the Moscow Chess Open, where the robot was being used as an opponent to regular players. The video shows that the robot was a standard industrial arm adapted to move pieces on three chessboards simultaneously.
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"The robot broke the child's finger. This, of course, is bad," Sergey Lazarev, President of the Moscow Chess Federation, told the Russian news agency TASS.
Lazarev reportedly said: “We rented the robot, it has been used in many places, for a long time, with specialists… The child made a move and after that he had to give the robot time to respond, but the boy rushed and the robot grabbed him. We have nothing to do with the robot.”
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“There are certain safety rules and the child, obviously, violated them. When he made his move, he didn’t realize that he should have waited first,” said Sergey Smagin, vice-president of the Russian Chess Federation. “This is an extremely rare case, the first one I can remember,” he added.
The 7-year-old is said to be one of the 30 best chess players in the Russian capital in the under-nine category. “People rushed to help him and pulled out the young player’s finger, but the fracture could not be prevented.”
The child's finger was put in a cast and his parents have reportedly contacted the prosecutor's office.
It's unclear what explanation the robot's creators gave for this chess tournament accident, but such incidents are not uncommon in scenarios where engineers have not properly considered safety protocol around humans.
In most industrial settings, robots move along predefined paths at set times and often lack sensors to recognize or respond to humans. In other words: if you are in their way, they don't know you are there.
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In the case of the chess-playing robot, it appears that the device was designed only to recognize and move chess pieces – not to respond to the appearance of a human hand in the playing.
The robot's designers appear to have disregarded safety rules, creating a machine that could unintentionally harm people. A number of key features could have prevented the accident – from placing a camera above the chessboard that disables the robot's movement if foreign objects appear in the frame, to limiting the force that can be extracted from the robot's hand.
Source: www.theverge.com
