A chess robot in Moscow has broken the finger of its human opponent

neat!

It doesn’t even need to be that complicated. The moving pieces can move between other pieces.

For example: https://youtu.be/JhoLEbUOYlk

A small plastic tube sucking air in to lift a piece would also do well.

The Milton Bradley Grandmaster had that in 1983: https://youtube.com/watch?v=kEV7WRGYwGI

> How about a magnetic base on each piece and a table built on top of a pair of xyz movements holding two magnets

Cheap chess playing devices like this have been available on the consumer market at least since the 80s.

My parents got me one from Toys R Us about 40 years ago.

The problem is that such devices are not as much of a spectacle as a big robot arm that moves by itself.

This public will probably be able to understand mode (type), median and average - in general.

As someone from the Baltics, this is so out touch with reality that it's outright laughable.

> On the other side, every single person from there I've asked this specifically agreed their country is utterly corrupt mess, government after government, with tight coupling to big brother russia and mafia.

No, not really. For example, Estonia has been very well governed, including deep digitalisation of the economy, one of the best educational systems in the world and a complete and utter dislike/hate for all things Russian.

I gather you don't know what you are talking about but painting broad strokes so wrongly over 3 States who have been peacefully revolutionised in the past 30 years is offensive.

The story you got told is just plain wrong

> specifically agreed country is utterly corrupt mess, government after government, with tight coupling to <bad people>.

Isn't that (citizens thinking that) the same for most countries in the world?

Like I'm pretty sure many US citizens would say the same.

Or UK citizens.

Or German citizens.

Or <insert EU member state> citizens.

Or Singapore, Australia, china, japan.

etc.

through they might mean different thing when they say "corrupted mess".

And yes, all the mentioned states are corrupt to different degrees in different way. But I think finding citizens which would describe their country as "corrupt mess" isn't a problem (except if they are afraid about repercussions).

Thank you, reasonable stranger.

Use of 'Should' suggests he shouldn't have. Which suggests he made the error rather than the robot.

At best you can read it neutrally. But you could also read it as blaming the child.

It's the law and courts that let them get away with it, not EULA.

The poster has not stated that robots would be inherently unsafe. (And if they were judged so, it would also be in consideration that humans also are.)

Anyway: the difference is in explicit projectual intention. Some systems are created with a dimension (contextually, safety) as a key performance indicator, some other as just a factor to be sensibly taken into consideration. If you are drawing the project for a plane, a main thing you'll keep in mind is that it will have to stay up; if a toy, safety is required but not part of the function.

I think it’s an inference from domain specific common sense in robotics.

“Inherently safe” is a technical term. It’s an ideal form that almost never materializes, so “functional safety” substitutes it and arguments are made as to what risks exists or how they should be mitigated.

“Inherently unsafe” as reverse of that means an object cannot be safe no matter what; A bomb next to a person can be an example. Had a driverless car inherently unsafe, it cannot be placed on public road.

The original argument therefor means, that it is established that cars and robots can be safe-fied with functional safety standards and measures such that only tolerable risks exist, so they cannot be inherently unsafe, so generally they can be let be on public roads or around people with conditions.

Yet it is still valid for their strategy during the invasion of Ukraine.

They don’t need sophisticated weaponry or artillery. Just a slow push until the opponent is exhausted.

Losses are irrelevant: they can always be hidden or denied because you control media.

Some may have put a number somewhere, but the general idea is not unique. And of course, there is that """detail""": «during a regular /training/ operation». This is the humour of Crock (Bill Rechin, Brant Parker and Don Wilder): «Losing fourteen men on patrol bothering you Poulet? You are thinking of bettering it, but we do not have twenty-eight to spare».

More to the glacial reality, it is said that the notorious dictator who made the move in '39, once presented with a report of particularly heavy losses, after a pause said "After all, this is what the young are for". Some people can have so debatable ideas.

Yes, this

I suppose that's a nice way of saying "We never trained it not to break someone's finger".

Yeah, I fully expect Autopilot to have different failure modes than human drivers, but what I’m interested in is the different fatality rates (deaths per hundred million miles, adjusted for different types of roads i.e., highway vs city streets). If Autopilot can save hundreds of lives annually to human-error mistakes like falling asleep at the wheel, etc but at the cost of one life annually due to obscure failure modes like driving toward a train, I maintain that we should not only allow Autopilot, but probably even mandate it on new vehicles. Sacrificing hundreds or thousands of lives annually because we don’t like the specific failure modes seems absurd. Of course, if it doesn’t save lives, then we should block its deployment on those grounds (but the particular kind of failure mode shouldn’t affect the calculus).

Pretty much this. They could have called it Super Cruise Control or something and I'm pretty sure nobody would have anything to say, because it is expected that cruise control be supervised, but, I think people wouldn't be quite as willing to pay a lot of money for a feature that didn't sound so remarkable.

I really don’t see how anything could matter more than “does it save lives, on balance”. If it saves thousands of lives annually, then why would we let tenuous marketing grievances forestall its deployment? How many lives should we sacrifice over branding concerns? Of course, if the technology doesn’t save lives on balance, then that’s reason enough to restrict deployment, but in any case marketing issues don’t seem like they should factor into the calculus.

I don't think you nor anyone else knows when AGI is likely to happen. I also don't think that incorrectly believing a machine is sentient when it is not is a "bigger danger."

Again, an improperly aligned AGI could kill the entire human race. I'm not sure what harm incorrectly believing a machine is sentient might do, but I don't think it would be as bad as human extinction or enslavement which are both real possibilities with AGI.

I think that's a reasonable stance, but only for some values of "soon". In a hundred years, we may well have AGI. At that time, we better have developed a robust science for how to control them. This is a somewhat unrelated problem to the current problem of machine/AI safety and both require more focus than they currently get.

I was mostly being facetious, I have done my research. I don’t really expect many legitimately good answers (although I’ll keep an open mind).

I’m still waiting for those GPT-3 and deep fake horror stories we were warned about to come to reality.

Maybe ML needs more script kiddy frameworks like KaliOS for these tools before the justifications to slow down R&D will finally be justified?

They are using ML algorithms on CNC machines and it’s causing AI ethical concerns?

Building experimental robotics on a production floor with workers walking around sounds like a normal safety issue not an AI one.

Not any AI then?

It does not excuse such a reckless use of industrial equipment around people without appropriate failsafes.

A robotic arm like this not a toy, is a deadly machine with a lot of force and a lot of mass. If you were standing next to it for some reason it could unexpectedly swing around and break your neck in an instant. Engineers should be careful to design such systems with failsafes that account for any action the operator might take.

He’s still just a little kid. Even the most precocious kids are still kids.

So you're saying he's already done at least one unreasonable thing...

Oh, that settles it. Robot cannot do things that are outside of the rules of chess.

Kid should have known better than to open with the classic, "break my finger" opening from the regulation standard rules.

Industrial robotics are incredibly dangerous. They operate without concern for anything in their path. Robotic arms like this can be lethal, and the idea that the robot wouldn't ever do anything unusual is, quite frankly, laughable naive.

He's responsible for a gross oversight in safety that led to an injured child. There were obvious and simple safety precautions that were missed.

This wasn't just, "whoops", this was fairly gross negligence.

Why is it children injured by robots who need to toughen up rather than the people nostalgic for a past they never experienced?

That sort of argument might work well for a time when slavery was a recent memory and children frequently worked in factories instead of going to school. That doesn't mean it works equally well for the present day, or for the kind of future most of us would probably prefer.

I meant it literally. It's difficult to raise children without thinking about them, and if we don't raise any children...

'dont wish upon others that Wich you yourself cannot endure'

I'm confused. You think if we don't let robots break childrens fingers because we insist on proper safety, then the industry of physical chess playing robots might never get off the ground?

We could have had a perfectly good industrial revolution with more mechanical safeguards and less child labor.

If a machine is 20x faster than human labor, and making it safe knocks off 10%, that's fine. And it'll leave you with better employees over time. It's only a problem if you're in a race to the bottom that doesn't care about worker safety.

The industrial revolution and accompanying urbanization lowered birth rates.

Technological progress is not necessarily good for the species, although it can be (c.f. the advent of new agriculture methods creating more food post WW2).

From the article: "We rented the robot, it used to be with experts in many places for a long time. Apparently the operators overlooked that."

“It was cheaper” is how Chernobyl nearly permanently destroyed the water supply of all of eastern and parts of Central Europe.

“Y’all want to see my robot arm?” seems like a great way to kick off a conversation!

If I had a robotic arm at home, I'd use it for making cocktails.

I really hope the answer is "robot chess"

It’s to move pcbs for firmware uploading and testing.

I built the jig for firmware uploading and testing last year. Had to place the pcb on the jig manually and wait (~2 minutes) for the process to complete.

I’m building the robot cell this year which will do a batch of ~15 pcbs at a time.

I update often on Social Media! http://www.instagram.com/kokonautinc

MG400 is really affordable, Dobot also has a smaller educational/tinker version called the Magician (lots of other ones: uArm, mycobot/mypalletizer, mirobot, etc). A step above the MG400, price wise, would be an Epson Scara or a 6-dof Yaskawa MotoMini. Lots of Scara Robots in the 5-20k price range. 6-dof like UR3 or Motoman Mini are like 20-50k. Ebay has a bunch of used ones that are much cheaper too!

That also looks supper sketchy and dangerous. Happy now?

In fact, it's the same country and the same establishment. While Chernobyl is currently, as everybody knows, Ukrainian territory - at the time it was the territory of the USSR, and the dominating culture was Soviet - which despite being theoretically "internationalist" actually meant "Russian Imperial". People who made decisions there may have been born anywhere, but they all spoke Russian, and they all looked to Moscow for authority. And the establishment largely did not change in Russia since then - while some people went away, naturally or forcefully, and some new people came in, the new people now in Russia were largely parts of the same establishment as in the USSR - they just went up a number of rungs on the ladder when the top elites had to retire. The classic case is Putin - who is ex-KGB - but if you look at his team, you'll see most of them have roots in the old establishment or have been brought in by the people from the old establishment. In contrast to Ukraine, where old elites largely lost power (new ones are far from perfect either, but that's a topic for another day) and have been replaced, in Russia this replacement never really happened - and that may be a good key to why what is happening now is happening.

Is 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.

>Dude, you are just projecting your spite. This would be laughable if I didn't know you were serious. So it's actually just scary how how you make things up.

I lived in Russia for the first 27 years of my life (but I've been out for 11 years). The claimed phenomena definitely existed and was widespread back then. I was an odd duck by being ready to openly accept my mistakes / misdoings, and I was not alone, but that was not common.

I'm sorry to scare you, please drink a cup of warm tea and listen to some good music, it will relax you. I haven't made up a thing though, I've observed this culture personally for decades. I grew up in it. Not sure what you mean by "spite" - nor do I care that much - and of course, I could be mistaken, but these were my observations and my conclusions, nothing is made up.

Please don't cross into personal attack, no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are. It just makes everything worse.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

I realize that's not easy on divisive, emotionally charged topics, but everyone commenting here is required to try.

Yes, let's judge an entire culture by a random bus stop experience.

Replace "Russian" with "Black" and this would be considered a racist post.

I think this comment already has at least a half of the culture war bingo. If you add a couple of -isms and maybe a -phobia or two, you will have a definite winner.

That has to be sarcasm. Or trying to be funny, but not very well.

There was almost nothing “conservative” about Leninism. The same goes for Stalinism. Your comment actually just made me want to but “The Atheist Manual” (or something similar, can’t remember the exact title) that was published in 1950s USSR and which I found in a Romanian translation in an antique bookshop that I usually frequent.

Three or four parties could easily happen in the USA of they'd change their electoral system. FPTP system and lack of culturally divergent regions (like Scotland in the UK) is the reason there are no third / fourth powers. If, say, half of Congress were elected by party lists, there'd be a lot of political diversity fast.

France had been ruled by kings, and before that, the Roman Empire for thousands of years, and then one day we had a revolution and became freedom-loving leftists. Same can happen in Russia -indeed, same DID happen in Russia, until the USSR turned into a totalitarian state under Stalin.

Also, the US can totally have a multi-party system if they reform their electoral system. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

He said no such thing, he said that the planet was named "Матросская тишина" (seaman's silence) after this prison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrosskaya_Tishina .

And you are aware that he's playing the russian version of the game, right? Translating some bits for the english audience. I'm sure he's perfectly aware what the name of the game is in russian (it's literally in the first shot of the video).

Seems like you watched 5min to just quickly find something to discredit and immediately dismiss it.

> Should I find Manhunt or Postal to be a mirror of American culture? "Interesting perspective", "insightful social commentary"?

Not a "mirror" of a culture, but if you were not already versed in American culture and watched an insightful review of those games pulling on various culture trends which make up those games, I see no reason why it couldn't be an "Interesting perspective" or "insightful social commentary".

Feel free to read the responses others have given to my initial post, they cover your complaints quite handily.

> Was Lenin a conservative?

Lenin ruled for barely 4 years. Since November 1917 till late 1921, when he already had been gravely ill and was largely removed from all power and left as a figurehead. In 1923, he had his third stroke, and his days were numbered. So, compared to overall Russia's history, Lenin's four years have been but a brief episode. Stalin, who replaced him, was a conservative ruler (though of course not the kind of "conservative" that we have now in America, obviously), so were all up to maybe Gorbachev - who ruled for about 6 years overall. As you can see, not being a conservative leader in Russia means a rather short tenure, somehow.

> Now this have changed and we have entered very 'interesting' times.

If you think people in Russia will raise up and overthrow Putin because of the suffering he has inflicted on them due to his insane lust for conquest - don't hold you breath for it. He has much better chance do die as a Tsar (which is what most Russian Tsars did) than to be deposed. Russian people, as a mass, have absolutely zero inclination to overthrow Putin's regime.

Point contextually not clear. "Be careful of sources?" That would be as generic as Cato's "Oh, and should I remind you that we should destroy Carthage".

I assume you mean me. But which country do you mean? I lived in several. I grew up in a culture I am describing. I still maintain contact with many people living there. I base my conclusions on my experiences and data I gathered for decades. You base your conclusions on ignorance and stereotypes - you have no other choice since you don't know me. But you try to mock me - unsuccessfully, of course, because you don't know anything - maybe you should spend a bit of time on gathering your own information instead.

It probably happened many times in the past too. This culture is not new.

Misrepresenting - sure. Accurately representing - well, I guess it still can be propaganda, but propagating the truth bears no shame.

It is interesting though how the defender of Russian culture chooses to wield a Western weapon of "hate speech" accusation. In Russia, "hate speech" would be something that the government does not approve of. Including telling the literal truth - such as calling the war the war - or even saying that patriotism is not kissing the ass of the President (a person got arrested for that, though I don't think they decided to prosecute - that'd be interesting to see them attempt to prove that patriotism actually is just that!)

> propaganda

Well you're right, Russia (especially under Putin) has spent a long time presenting itself as the bogeyman of Europe with rampant international threats and assassinations, and now you're surprised people are afraid? That was the whole intention and well congrats, it worked. You don't get to have it both ways so kindly piss off.

I’m curious: You don’t think that being continuously exposed to government propaganda and threatened with jail/fines for dissenting opinions will increase the frequency of “shitty people”?

Always wanted to live in a museum! So much fun, never boring.

Not exactly the same but there's the legendary McDonald's lawsuit after some customer burned his finger after dropping his coffee.

It's funny cause I've seen similar situation with people of wildly different social status. A big lawyer asking a court clerk for files. He grabbed them like a moron, folders all slipped and fell. We all saw it coming but assumed he wouldn't be so goofy. The young lady clerk still jumped to help him gather the files. His first word: You stacked them wrong you idiot. She smiled and he got away with being an impolite moron.

Now seeing a waitress act like this to a customer is even weirder :)