Robot chess player breaks his opponent’s finger, a 7-year-old boy

A chess robot governed by a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence, it got a little too much to get carried away (literally) during a exhibition tournament in Moscow in which he was engaged in three challenges at the same time: in the heat, he indeed grabbed and fractured the finger of one of his opponents, a seven-year-old boy called Christopher. In the video leaked online it can be observed how the little player hurries to move the chess just after the robotic arm which, in response, suddenly hooks his hand and frees it only after the intervention of some present.

But let’s start from the bottom or the good news: Christopher did not suffer major damage and he also managed to finish the tournament the following day, however the parents contacted the authorities to shed some light on the incident. How told from the president of the Moscow Chess Federation, Sergey Lazarev: “The robot caused the fracture of the child’s finger and of course it is something very bad“. It is not yet clear what the precise cause of the crime is, but according to the manager “The little one did not give the robot enough time to formulate a response after a move“: in fact, from video broadcast on Telegram you see Christopher, that is one of the top 30 under-9 players in the Russian capitalmake a move when the robotic arm was still depositing a piece inside a binder, effectively sending it into tilt.

Something that shouldn’t happen and that fortunately caused “only” a fracture in a finger, but that underlines how much automata and robotic elements can cause problems in case of malfunction, even in a seemingly harmless display like a chess tournament. In this regard, it is only last week the news that Amazon records more accidents and injuries at work in warehouses that use robots than those populated only by humans.