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Way back in 1982, during my first year in graduate school, two friends and I went to New York City over spring break. One of my friends had a great-aunt and great-uncle who lived in an apartment on Central Park West, and we stayed there. The square-footage of the living room in that apartment was bigger than that of the entire house I grew up in. Fred Silverman lived in the apartment across the hall from them. It was a level of wealth and culture I had never experienced before, and have rarely seen since.
One day, my friends and I took a walk from this apartment, which was somewhere in the 70s, down to Canal Street, way at the southern end of Manhattan Island. (We took the subway back, but then went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a long day.)
Toward the end of our long walk, we passed an arcade. I went to arcades in those days to play pinball and the primitive computer games that were available at the time. When we entered, I noticed that, in addition to the usual games, there was an unusually large box that looked entirely unfamiliar. The box was taller than me. On the left side, there was a relatively narrow panel which contained the coin slot and a set of buttons to allow one to play the game. The larger right side of the box had a glass window behind which one saw… a chicken. The challenge: Play tic-tac-toe against this chicken. How could I resist? So I inserted my two quarters (at that time, twice as expensive as any of the other games), and played. Over the 40+ intervening years, I can no longer remember how the play unfolded, but I do recall that the chicken got the first move. A minute later, I was flabbergasted when the chicken won. I couldn’t believe it. Thinking this must have been a fluke, I deposited two more quarters into the box, ...and I lost again.
I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of this story at dinner parties and other social occasions. It was gratifying to be able to provide independent verification of the story when, back in 1999, an article by Calvin Trillin appeared in The New Yorker (entitled The Chicken Vanishes) about the chicken who plays tic-tac-toe in the Chinatown arcade on Mott Street. (Before reading the article, I could never have told anyone precisely where in Manhattan to find this arcade.)
It’s remarkable how well Trillin describes my emotions and responses as I was losing at tic-tac-toe to this chicken:
The chicken is in a glass cage that is outfitted with the sort of backlit letters common to pinball machines—so that, at the appropriate time, “Your Turn” or “Bird’s Turn” lights up. When it’s your turn, you push a button on the outside of the cage to light up your “X” in one box or another; when it’s the bird’s turn, the bird goes behind an opaque piece of glass marked “Thinkin’ Booth” and pecks once to produce an “O” in a box you were sort of hoping it wouldn’t notice. If you win, you get a bag of fortune cookies. I furnish the entry fee—fifty cents. I am, after all, the host. When I tell the chicken story, I always point out that nearly all the people I take down there have precisely the same response to the prospect of playing ticktacktoe with a chicken. After looking the situation over, they say, “The chicken gets to go first!”
“But she’s a chicken,” I say. “You’re a human being. Surely there should be some advantage in that.”
Some of my guests, I always report with some embarrassment, don’t stop there. Some of them say, “The chicken plays every day. I haven’t played in years.”
Yeah, my tic-tac-toe skills were rusty then, and even rustier now. The chicken loses only very rarely. The best one can do most commonly is a draw. The rest of the article goes on to describe how this chicken (and others like it) obtain their shark-like tic-tac-toe skills.
There you have the chicken story—unless, of course, you want to get into the B. F. Skinner part. Some people have been surprised to hear that the chicken story has a B. F. Skinner part. Some years ago, though, the writer Roy Blount, Jr., informed me that in Arkansas he had once met the people who trained the chicken to play ticktacktoe, and, as he remembered it, they turned out to be former graduate students of B. F. Skinner, one of the giants of behavioral psychology. After that, I sometimes added the B. F. Skinner part when I told the chicken story. I said that I hoped that part was true because it would be another refutation of the fallacious notion that graduate study is of no value in the practical workaday world. O.K., I sometimes said “canard” instead of “fallacious notion.”
[...]
In the Times piece [a story reporting the death of Willy, the tic-tac-toe playing chicken on Mott Street], Kaufman mentioned that Willy had been trained in Hot Springs, Arkansas. With that partial confirmation of Blount’s testimony in hand, I tracked down a phone number for Educated Animals, a tourist attraction that shared a short block in Hot Springs with the House of Crystals rock and souvenir shop and Tiny Town (“World’s Largest Animated Village”). The proprietor, Mark Duncan, told me that Educated Animals didn’t have coin-operated units, but that Willy might well have been trained by the people who once ran a place on the same premises which was called I.Q. Zoo. While we were on the phone, he informed me that Educated Animals featured, in addition to such acts as a Vietnamese pig that drives a Cadillac and a parrot that roller-skates, a chicken that dances while a rabbit plays the piano and a duck plays the guitar. “What tune do they play?” I asked. Duncan said it was their choice.
The point of Trillin’s 1999 New Yorker article was to report that the entire chicken concession had disappeared from the arcade on Mott Street. In fact, tic-tac-toe-playing chicken concessions across the country had been in the process of disappearing all across the country at that time as interest waned and animal rights activists complained, suspicious that the chickens were subject to abuse (they weren’t). So I figured that, since 1999, chickens that play tic-tac-toe had become one of those curious elements of “olden times” that old people could bore others about (as I do now).
Then last Monday, after trimming Hubby’s uncle’s roses (an annual ritual), I told my story of losing at tic-tac-toe twice to a chicken to those gathered (who hadn’t heard it before). By a remarkable coincidence, on the drive home, we listened to a Radiolab podcast entitled “G: The World’s Smartest Animal,” where a comedian named Jordan Mendoza nominated the chicken, and the evidence for the claim was the fact that chickens were beating humans at tic-tac-toe in coin-operated concessions just like the one I played back in 1982!1
These concessions have reappeared over the last decade, but in various casinos nationwide. The prize for beating the chicken isn’t a bag of fortune cookies, but could range anywhere from $10,000 to credit for playing other casino games. Trillin mentions that some chicken concessions in casinos in the ‘80s and ‘90s also offered $10,000 for winning against the chicken, but they had disappeared by the time he wrote the article. If my brief Google search, I was surprised to discover that there was a tic-tac-toe-playing chicken at the local casino in Erie, PA, near where I used to live. I had no idea.
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1Mendoza also made the claim that the chicken wasn’t really the one making the decision of where to put her Os, that instead the chicken was just pecking at a light bulb, and a computer was the instrument that made the decisions. When I heard that, I searched the internet for some kind of chicken exposé, revealing evidence that the bird had nothing to do with the concession’s output, but I found nothing of the sort. Trillin, in his article, notes that while there is a computer in the box which translates the chicken’s choices to the tic-tac-toe grid, it’s really still the chicken making the choices. As such, the claim still stands that that when you play one of these concessions, you really are playing against a chicken.
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