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A chess robot in Moscow has broken the finger of its human opponent
- nextstepguy 4y ago"We have nothing to do with the robot." Except for putting it in a location to be used by children. Lame excuse.
- choonway 4y agoIt shoudn't even be anywhere near an adult for that matter. Even a trained operator wouldn't be putting fingers where there was no safety interlock. for example, two buttons you must keep pressed with both hands before the robot starts to move and will stop immediately once you prematurely let go of it.
- _jal 4y agoThat's an aggressive opening.
- romwell 4y ago
- willcipriano 4y ago> launching the largest land war in Europe since War World 2. Who launched the largest war since WW2?
- johnnyApplePRNG 4y ago
- EddySchauHai 4y agoSecond Congo War, or the African World War, between Rwanda and Uganda was huge (1998-2003). 5.4 million casualties.
- defrost 4y agoand more or less a direct offshoot of the major nuclear powers (USA and Russia) jockeying for control via proxies of the regions with the largest purest resources to feed into the Cold War nuclear demand. A great deal of off the book destabilisation took place throughout central Africa to suppress strong independant government and knock down successive puppet governments.
- planarhobbit 4y agoHN isn’t the website for this kind of rhetoric.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- romwell 4y agoYou're almost correct. HN isn't the website for this kind of article. Highlighting the context of the content (which the article carefully omitted) is what HN is all about. Russian tech is used to murder people in my country. It's hypocritical to be discussing Russian tech while trying to censor the mentions of its applications. HN isn't the website for this kind of hypocrisy.
- twayt 4y ago
- kadoban 4y agoIf you're making a robot to interact with humans, part of that is making it safe.
- twayt 4y agoYou can always design something to be better but part of interacting with a machine is not assuming that it will do the safe thing 100% of the time and acting appropriately. If you're driving a car and it hydroplanes, is it the car's fault for losing traction? No, you should have been aware that it was a risk you were exposed to the moment you stepped into the car. Can you design a car that is less likely to hydroplane? Sure, but there's always going to be an edge case it can't handle perfectly.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agothat's not how the law works, if you are controlling a car and hydroplane into a child, you are going to prison.
- bagels 4y agoBad example. Automobile drivers usually don't face serious charges for killing pedestrians unless drunk.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoVaries by country. In Uk we convicted a cyclist for ‘wanton and furious driving' when he hit some old lady crossing the road, fatally. I am reasonably certain that if your car flew into the sidewalk and killed pedestrains, you would be in serious trouble.
- lostapathy 4y ago
- marcodiego 4y agoVideo of the incident: https://twitter.com/xakpc/status/1550224137041371144 https://twitter.com/xakpc/status/1550224137041371144
- sergiotapia 4y agoThe design is very human.
- carbadtraingood 4y agoThe answer from the federation is unconscionable. They blamed the boy and then said they could not be held responsible. Fuck off, a kid made a reasonable kid movement. If the robot wasn't ready to be around children, it shouldn't have been deployed around children. And there should have been a big red button that immediately everything, within reach of every player.
- twayt 4y ago
- kstenerud 4y agoThis is why in civilized societies the government mandates minimum safety standards so that a company is not even allowed to place such dangerous equipment around people. You wouldn't be allowed to build a mangler anymore in a civilized society, waiver or no.
- imachine1980_ 4y agoThat why in civilized societies use illegal immigrants or put the factory in other countries who have less safety regulations and then import it, or have corporationsso big that they are untouchable.
- kstenerud 4y ago[flagged]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- beached_whale 4y agoIf this was any workplace in many countries, the robot owner would totally be culpable, even if it wasn't a child. There's a reason that people are not allowed near robots in many cases.
- kstenerud 4y agoOne has to wonder why the hell they'd make a chess robot with a grip so strong that it takes the concerted effort of two adults to pry it loose. And blaming it on the kid was real classy.
- Nextgrid 4y agoThe robot is a standard industrial robot arm that happens to be used for chess - it it was not made to be a chess robot. This is absolutely overkill for chess even just from a cost perspective so you wouldn't build something like this if you actually were building a chess robot. The amount of pressure this robot applies is totally adequate for its normal operating environment which is far away from humans. There might be a way to vary the level of force applied but it may have been abstracted away (maybe you need to go one level lower to get that level of control) by a simpler API for applications where a "default" level of pressure is acceptable.
- kstenerud 4y agoWhich leads to the next question: WHY is such a dangerous robot being used to play chess against people?
- Nextgrid 4y agoMost likely because they got it for cheap/free and someone had some fun programming it without ever thinking about the dangers - presumably they never actually observed just how much force this thing could produce.
- jwsteigerwalt 4y ago
- wly_cdgr 4y agoAh yes, the Skynet Defense
- bagels 4y agoIn factories humans are physically excluded from the reach of robotic arms like this. It is negligence to operate this thing where it could reach a kid.
- hinkley 4y agoCouldn’t they have done this with magnets and the arm mounted upside down below the table where it couldn’t eat people? They did it like this for a lot of reasons. One is because it looks cooler to have the arm moving pieces around. “Looking cooler” has been the cause of many a lost limb and more than a few eyeballs.
- tzs 4y agoSome links to a couple other places covering this that might be easier to read and have more detail. https://www.newsweek.com/chess-robot-goes-rogue-breaks-seven-year-old-player-child-finger-1727104 https://www.newsweek.com/chess-robot-goes-rogue-breaks-seven... https://www.pcgamer.com/a-chess-playing-robot-broke-a-kids-finger/ https://www.pcgamer.com/a-chess-playing-robot-broke-a-kids-f...
- tomger 4y agoIn the beginning, there was man. And for a time, it was good. But humanity's so-called civil societies soon fell victim to vanity and corruption. Then man made the machine in his own likeness. Thus did man become the architect of his own demise - second renaissance
- bamboozled 4y ago
- xwdv 4y agoWe need to regulate how strong a robotic arm can be allowed to be if it interacts with humans.
- Aeolun 4y agoIn Soviet Russia, robot arm regulates you!
- vorticalbox 4y agoWhy did the AI decide to do that action at all?
- aendruk 4y agoIt looks like the machine’s bishop was capturing the kid’s queen. Humans usually do that in one motion, bumping the bishop into the queen. Most of the machine’s moves also are one motion, but its captures take two: 1) ensure that the destination square is clear, then 2) move the attacking piece. For all of typical games and most of this game, there’s a rhythm of alternating motions between players. After the machine’s first motion here, the kid absentmindedly continued the rhythm and made his next move, which was to capture the attacking bishop at its destination. The machine, naive to the anomaly, continued ensuring that the destination square was empty.
- bmacho 4y agoSomeone wrote move_arm_down() in its source.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- smsm42 4y agoIt's Russia we're talking about. In Russia, the default mode of answering any complaint is "it's your own fault, we're not responsible, go away". It's not only on the big political scene - it's everywhere, from a village grocery store to a national federation. If you admit any mistake and any responsibility for anything, you're an idiot and a "loch" (pronounced the same as Scottish lake, but means a person to be taken advantage of, one that is too stupid to take care of oneself and deserves to be cheated and mistreated). It's a culture-wide thing. And denying responsibility and lying is not considered really shameful in such situation - it's the expected behavior and getting away with it is a sign you are powerful and worthy of respect.
- dang 4y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32209674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32209674.
- birdyrooster 4y agoCome on, there is no way they are that cartoonish.
- markdown 4y agoThey're not. It's a massive country with many different races and cultures in it. Painting them all with one brush isn't very nice.
- Aeolun 4y agoThis is Moscow though. I think it’s fairly likely the culture in Moscow is fairly homogenous.
- carbadtraingood 4y agoIs it? Is the culture of Paris fairly homogenous? New York? London? Berlin? I would imagine the place has some shared cultural understandings, generally, but that a big city is going to be much more heterogenous. But maybe I'm thinking too micro scale.
- aj7 4y agoLooks like a robot that could load a 20kg bar of metal into a lathe.
- dymk 4y agoIt breaks fingers with 10 thou of repeatability
- juunpp 4y agoIt certainly has been pumping some iron.
- wakeupcall 4y agoAnd probably is. Looks like an off-the-shelf industrial arm from the video. The common recommendation around these powerful automated machines is to stay clear over the entire range of motion. These are difficult to secure even if they have force-sensing features, for the simple fact that it's incredibly difficult to foresee all possible ways you might need these sensors, and the sensing capability might be skewed toward higher forces. As others mentioned, this arm might stop by default if bumped, but maybe during the downward motion a sudden spike in pressure is expected to be seen to complete the step. Not taking sides here, just trying to explain that the entire concept of "fail safe" is _extremely_ hard to achieve even with apparently dumb moving machinery. A better solution if people are involved is to design a robot that can always be overpowered. But such structurally weak arm might be quite tricky to move, and probably start oscillating like jello without proper dampening and motion control. Not something I would expect to find or be able to purchase due to the lack of practical utility (besides playing chess I guess).
- aj7 4y agoExactly my impression. That damn thing had no business anywhere near a chessboard with a person who could put his hands “inside the cage.” But this is Russia, where it’s natural to blame the kid.
- Tao3300 4y agoRobot clearly doesn't understand en passant.
- saurik 4y agoAlso posted a couple days ago (with only a handful of comments) as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32187369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32187369 (in case anyone wants to read those).
- emsign 4y ago
- pg_bot 4y agoI have so many questions. 1.) What organizer/parent in their right mind thought that this was a good idea. Never place humans within the reach of industrial robots. He's lucky to have only broken a finger. 2.) Why make a robot pick up the pieces? Handling movement of chess pieces by a computer has been done safely since the early 1980's by Milton Bradley. 3.) Was the boy actually playing against a computer player? If so, why? Computers are already much better than humans and have nothing left to prove in the chess arena. If he's playing a human why is a human not moving the pieces?
- justsomehnguy 4y ago> What organizer/parent in their right mind thought that this was a good idea. Never place humans within the reach of industrial robots. Would you scold Japanese the same if they "placed human within the reach of industrial robots"? Oops, they actually did that: > A robot arm (L), developed by Japanese auto parts maker Denso and operated by computer game software YaneuraOu, plays against professional shogi, or Japanese chess player Shinya Sato (R) in Tokyo on March 22, 2014 at the second match of the Denou-sen between computer and professional shogi players. https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/robot-arm-developed-by-japanese-auto-parts-maker-denso-and-news-photo/479985779 https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/robot-arm-deve...
- pg_bot 4y agolol yes that robot shouldn't be that close to that human.
- justsomehnguy 4y agoThen how about Germans? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTWM7LA540Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTWM7LA540Y
- krisoft 4y agoThat also looks supper sketchy and dangerous. Happy now?
- zoomablemind 4y ago
- csours 4y agoLook up Cobots and Cobot limitations for some context on why the fuck this should never have happened.
- usefulcat 4y agoTIL 'breaking the finger' is not an obscure chess move that I had never heard of.
- jmatthews 4y ago
- lovelearning 4y ago
- dmingod666 4y agoThere are clear perimeters set in industrial settings when robots are in operation for this precise reason. I'm sure the devs could have used much lower force values when dealing with the prices or put logic in place where if a hand is on the board the robot disengages. Hindsight is 20/20.. Looked horrific could barely watch for a few seconds.
- numpad0 4y agoNot every robots has force sensors and configurable force settings. Some only has overcurrrent error reporting, or only take positional inputs. The “correct” way to do this is to use weakened “cobot” type robots that are specifically designed to be operated around humans, add at least a laser fan-beam fence that robot is not allowed to move while any object is detected by it, and put a big red button somewhere with a guy in charge of pressing it as well. The fence is a must at the very least.
- drew-y 4y agoThis is appalling. There is no world in which an industrial robot like that should be operating next to a child. Their force sensors are not nearly sensitive enough to stop before causing serious injury. Going fast enough, they can absolutely kill you. This just screams negligence to me. Cannot believe they tried to blame it on the child. There are robots, called Cobots, designed specifically for this type of environment. They are highly specialized and extremely sensitive to unpredicted forces. Even then, you'd likely have a light curtain to stop the motion when anything crossed over into the table.
- brador 4y agoA robot designed to move chess pieces should never have enough power to break anything. Could be run from as little as 2 AA batteries. This is simply bad engineering.
- Someone 4y agoI think that’s challenging to achieve if you also want the robot to play well under time pressure. Even if you manage to build an actuator that can grab a piece quickly but can’t break anything, the required rapid movement of the arm still can break things.
- jhpaul 4y agoHow about a magnetic base on each piece and a table built on top of a pair of xyz movements holding two magnets. That way the brain can at any time grab its piece and make a move while nudging any obstructions out of the way temporarily. It could probably made to filp the polarity on the lower magnet causing the opponent piece to topple gently when appropriate. Seems very human proof and also exciting to watch in action.
- yakshaving_jgt 4y agoIt doesn’t even need to be that complicated. The moving pieces can move between other pieces. For example: https://youtu.be/JhoLEbUOYlk https://youtu.be/JhoLEbUOYlk
- thisishard 4y agoI watched the video and the robot most certainly did not grab the boy's index finger. Sequence of events 1. The robot was capturing the boy's queen with a bishop. For that, it first removed the queen from the board. 2a. The robot next moved the bishop onto the square where the queen was previously located. 2b. At the same time, the boy prematurely moved his rook to the same square, he completed the move before the bishop has been placed on the square 3. The robot completed its final downward motion to place the bishop onto the square while the boy's fingers were still on the rook, thus pinning the index finger between the bishop and the rook The robot didn't do anything it wasn't programmed to do
- Schiendelman 4y agoRight, this is why when we have robots that operate around humans we make sure they sense behaviors like that, and that they don’t use enough force to hurt humans.
- throwaways85989 4y agoSomething like https://www.kuka.com/en-de/products/robot-systems/industrial-robots/lbr-iiwa https://www.kuka.com/en-de/products/robot-systems/industrial... with adaptable force parameters should have been used.
- imtringued 4y agoYeah this isn't a case of rogue AI, it is a case of the stupid variety that does exactly what you tell it to, which includes crushing fingers if those happen to be in its path.
- akhmatova 4y agoThis attempt to exculpate the robot's actions (more more directly: the actions of its human programmers) is just ... bizarre. Yeah, the robot didn't specifically "grab" the boy's finger. It grabbed a piece while the boy's finger was still on it. Without having any idea what it was doing. Same thing, in other words -- in terms of the end result. And more to the point, it was an action that a human player would most likely have bounced back from, before completing the intended motion. The robot didn't do anything it wasn't programmed to do. Yup, it sure didn't. And that's precisely the problem.
- nelox 4y ago
- rejor121 4y ago
- LightG 4y ago
- ribit 4y ago
- CTDOCodebases 4y ago
- drno123 4y agoThis is not so much different from Teslas crashing.
- petre 4y ago
- squarefoot 4y ago
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
- mrkramer 4y agoThat's one way of winning a game :)
- faanghacker 4y agoHan Solo was apparently wrong when he said "droids don't rip people's arms off when they lose."
- foverzar 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- drew-y 4y agoYour complaint about this thread making heated overgeneralizations is valid. It's not fair to generalize a single incident as being representative of an entire culture. Which is ironic, because you then go on to make a similar mistake with inflammatory statements like this: > I know where that way of reasoning had led you and what you did towards Jews, Romani, Black people, Latinos and Arabs. You sick duplicitous facists. I know it is frustrating. But let's try to keep this a civil discussion. > One even considers that one day they might be forced to switch from civilian engineering towards the military one, since these behavior patterns all all too familiar. What are you implying here?
- foverzar 4y ago
- GistNoesis 4y agoA few questions : I'm not sure of why did the robot stop ? Is the robot controlled by the tablet we see at the top ? It seems a human that is not the robot operator panicked and pressed something (on-screen emergency stop button ?). Did the robot stop because it detected an excess force/failure to reach position, and is in fact not stopped and trying to reach position (aka crushing finger till the claw reach its closed position ?). If e-stop was pressed, what would have happened if no-one pressed the e-stop ? would the kid have been dragged across the board then released a few seconds later when the piece would have been dropped ? How much force is there in the claw of this robot ? What happens when the e-stop is pressed, does the robot fall limp or does it hold position with power in the motor or does it hold position because it is not back-drivable ?
- KingMob 4y agoThe robot took exception to his pointer, and made it null.
- hgazx 4y agoThat’ll teach you, nerd.
- fifticon 4y agoThis is consistent with my impression of russia.
- amatecha 4y ago... this kind of machinery is usually used for industrial automation and should absolutely never have been employed for playing chess matches with children... completely irresponsible, wow.
- PedroBatista 4y agoTo be fair, this is how you win in Russia these days..
- BrandoElFollito 4y agoI wonder why the robot did it. Was it because it was programmed to also be the arbiter? And actively prevent people from making illegal moves? If so the designers are idiots. Or maybe it was a bug and it thought that the finger was a piece? If so the designers make a bug. Still worrisome but at least not plain idiotic.
- moffkalast 4y agoIt probably only checks the state before/after and blindly does the arm movement in between as is usual for these industrial robots, since they can do this quite percisely without active corrections. I doubt it has any kind of hand or finger detection built in, since all you need is to figure out the board state.
- BrandoElFollito 4y agoI had a look several times at the video (the quality is awful) and it seems that it is going for the position of the piece of the boy. This cannot happen in chess. So if it squeezed his finger because it expected his own piece there, then this is a serious bug in the program.
- ankaAr 4y agoThe camarad Iōánnēs Kylevich Connor was attacked.
- neogodless 4y agoAsimov's First Law!
- COMMENT___ 4y agoWhen I read about this my first question was why they use industrial machine as a chess robot. I believe that the answer is “just to show off”. But IMO this makes an opposite effect. They could use a pair of magnets attached to each chess piece and chess board. One under the board, one attached to the piece. Then move magnets under the board and voila chess pieces move automagically. I think that I saw a similar toy somewhere.
- amai 4y agoProbably a cyber attack by Ukraine in response to the bombarding of Odessas port.
- ChrisArchitect 4y ago"Shall we play a game?"
- dang 4y agoAll: nationalistic flamewar is not ok on HN, regardless of which country you have a problem with. Yes, there is a war going on. That makes following this rule harder, and also makes it more important. The level to which many commenters stooped in this thread was shameful. Please review the site guidelines and stick to them if you want to keep commenting here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Note this one in particular: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."