Some might argue that broken fingers are an appropriate response to an illegal chess move, but breaking a seven-year-old chess player’s digits for no reason?

In fairness, the article in The Guardian alludes to the machine misreading the boy’s fingers as a chess piece, but it’s brutal to watch either way:

WARNING: GRAPHIC ⚠️ A chess-playing robot grabs a 7-year-old’s finger during a match at the Moscow Open and breaks it pic.twitter.com/I95VYwjk3S

— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) July 24, 2022

Sergey Lazarev, president of the Moscow Chess Federation, confirmed after the incident:

‘The robot broke the child’s finger. This is of course bad.’

You don’t say!

It seems the issue is that the lad went to play his turn before the robot completed its own move, which confused the machine.

 ‘The robot needs a few seconds to read the board in between each move. The boy moved the piece while the robot was scanning leading the robot to grab the boys finger instead of a piece.’

I’m not sure why a chess playing robot would be equipped with a 15 ton pneumatic press as an arm that is capable of snapping fingers in half, but hey – that’s Russian robots for you. The Moscow Chess Federation is insisting that this was a freak accident that has never happened before and will never happen again, but it’s still pretty mental that a chess robot capable of calculating 4 billion possible moves decided that breaking a seven-year-old’s fingers would be the best one. Makes you wonder whether is was an accident at all…

For the chess grandmaster who got busted using his mobile phone to cheat during a tournament, click HERE.