Robot already rusty

Here’s a new idea whose time has already passed: An R2-D2 that mechanically makes its own moves on the board and even presses its side of a chess clock.

The “chess robot” is the brainchild of Konstantin Kosteniuk, father and coach of world women’s champion Alexandra Kosteniuk. He said it has the power to play 24 hours a day for three years straight.

This month the robot had its coming-out party, a simultaneous exhibition in Moscow, but got off to a poor start against one of its three opponents, Arkady Dvorkovich. The robot’s king and queen were misplaced on each other’s square, and nobody noticed before Dvorkovich, head of the Russian chess federation, won the machine’s queen.

But he was outplayed after that and was losing when the robot made a second mistake: It forgot to punch its clock and was forfeited on time.
Dvorkovich, a top aide to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, said he wanted to show off the robot at an international economics forum as an example of Russian ingenuity. But why anyone would want to have a robot as an opponent — rather than one of the much stronger computer programs that are widely available —is a mystery.