Dylan Bettencourt
The cross-over to sport in robotic technology has not been as smooth as intended – as one seven-year-old boy found out.
Chess is a slow-paced game based on strategy and very little violence. However a robot designed to play chess seemed to have missed out on the non-violence training.
At the Moscow Open chess tournament, a chess playing robot in Russia was unsettled by the quick responses by the boy and proceeded to grab his finger.
“The robot broke the child’s finger,” Sergey Lazarev, president of the Moscow Chess Federation, told TASS news agency.
The video of the incident that took place on 19 July showed the robot grabbing the child’s finger for several seconds before a woman and three men rushed to pull the boy away.
Sergey Smagin, vice-president of the Russian Chess Federation said the robot attacked the boy after taking one of his pieces instead of waiting for the robot to complete its move. The boy aimed for a quick response, angering the robot.
“There are certain safety rules and the child, apparently, violated them. When he made his move, he did not realise he first had to wait,” Smagin told Baza.
“This is an extremely rare case, the first I can recall.”
The president Lazarev however explained the incident differently, saying the child had “made a move, and after that we need to give time for the robot to answer, but the boy hurried and the robot grabbed him”
Regardless of how the incident happened, Lazarev said the robot engineers were going to have to take the technology back to the drawing board.
The president added that the boy, who is one of Russia’s 30 best chess players under the age of nine, did not seem traumatised by the events.
“The child played the very next day, finished the tournament while volunteers helped to record the moves,” he said.
The child’s parents are however reported to have contacted the public prosecutors office regarding the incident.
Image source: @Newsweek
