Ah, the famed Tic-Tac-Toe playing
chicken. You'll see them a lot in
midwestern
State Fairs, often next to the
bearded lady,
Lizard Man, and my personal favorite,
Horton, the Heroin Junkie.
The scheme goes a little something like this :
- Acquire a trainable chicken and a tic-tac-toe playing machine, the kind that never lose if they go first.
- Modify the machine to beep after the human opponent makes a move, and at the beginning of a game. Also rig up a button that tells the machine to make a move.
- Train the chicken to go and hit the button every time the machine sounds a beep. The best way is to reward the chicken with a kernel of chickeny foodstuff when it pecks the button.
- Put the chicken in a cage and hide the button in the cage between panels so that people can't see what's going on there.
Now you're set to start
parting fools and their money. The
chump walks up, pays money, and the
game starts. The machine
beeps on the start of the game, so the
chicken walks behind the panels and clearly
pecks at something; a move is made. The
rube moves; the
machine beeps; the chicken pecks the
button again and a move is made. To the
idiot there, since the
chicken is clearly
hitting some kind of hidden panel of
buttons, it
must be the one making the move...
So, knife, that's the trick. You can stop training that poor monkey to actually play now. You're just confusing the poor primate, you know?