At the Moscow Chess Open in July, a tabletop six-axis robot equipped with a two-finger gripper was programmed to play chess with three opponents simultaneously. During one match, an overenthusiastic seven-year-old boy reached for a piece before allowing the robot to complete its move. Suddenly, the gripper closed on the boy’s finger and broke it. After a brief struggle, several bystanders helped to free the child’s hand and take him away from the table.
“A robot broke a child’s finger—this is, of course, bad,” says Sergey Lazarev, president of the Moscow Chess Federation. Fortunately, the boy was otherwise unharmed, and he continued to compete in the tournament after his finger was put in a cast.