Russia truly is a unique place. Various outlets have reported that a chess robot broke the finger of a seven-year-old boy playing in a tournament in Russia. At the Moscow Chess Open, the machine robot arm customised to move pieces on three chess boards simultaneously injured the child.
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“The robot broke the child’s finger. This, of course, is bad,” Sergey Lazarev, President of the Moscow Chess Federation. “The robot was rented by us, it has been exhibited in many places, for a long time, with specialists. Apparently, the operators overlooked it. The child made a move, and after that we need to give time for the robot to answer, but the boy hurried, the robot grabbed him. We have nothing to do with the robot.”
There hasn’t been any statement from the creators of the robot at the time of writing. The robot doesn’t have sensors to detect anything in the way of its pre-programmed movements. Unfortunately the child got in the way of programmed movements, hence the injury.
“There are certain safety rules and the child, apparently, violated them. When he made his move, he did not realize he first had to wait,” Sergey Smagin, vice-president of the Russian Chess Federation. However, the operators of the machine violated standard safety rules in setting up the robot which could hurt actual players with its movements. A number of basic features could have prevented the accident — from placing a camera above the chess board that disables the robot’s movement if foreign objects appear in frame, to limiting the force that can be output by the robot’s arm.
Luckily the child will soon recover enough to continue to play. “The child played the very next day, finished the tournament in a cast, and the volunteers helped to record the moves,” Lazarev said. “The robot operators, apparently, will have to think about strengthening protection so that this situation does not happen again.”
