Chess robot breaks seven-year-old opponent’s finger

A chess-playing robot, apparently upset by its seven-year-old opponent's fast reactions, rudly grabbed and broke the boy's finger during a match at the Moscow Open.

The Baza Telegram channel released a video of the incident on 19 July, which shows the boy's finger being pinched by the robotic arm for several seconds before a woman and three men rushed in and rescued him.

The boy, Christopher, is one of the 30 best chess players in the Russian capital in the under-nine's category.  

"The boy 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. Suddenly it broke the child's finger," said Sergey Lazarev, president of the Moscow Chess Federation.

"The robot played many exhibitions previously without getting upset. But this is of course bad. Its suppliers are going to have to think again," Sergey Lazarev added.

"The robot appeared to pounce after it took one of the pieces from the boy. Rather than waiting for the robot to complete its move, the boy opted for a quick riposte," Sergey Smagin, vice-president of the Russian Chess Federation, told Baza.

"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 said.

"This is an extremely rare case, the first I can recall," he added.

Lazarev told Tass that Christopher, whose finger was put in a plaster cast, did not seem overly traumatised by the attack. "The child played the very next day, finished the tournament, and volunteers helped to record the moves," he said.

A Russian grandmaster Sergey Karjakin marked the incident as software error.

Back in 1979, Robert Williams, widely considered the first, was crushed to death by the arm of a one-tonne robot on Ford's Michigan production line. In 2015, a robot killed a 22-year old contractor at one of Volkswagen's German plants, grabbing him and crushing him against a metal plate.

More recently, Elaine Herzberg was killed by an Uber autonomous car that hit the 49-year-old at 40mph as she was crossing the road in Tempe, Arizona in 2018.