Shown on a total of nine displays arranged in a grid-like fashion is a game known as “tic-tac-toe” or “Noughts and Crosses,” with different pairings of four different types of players—“human,” “chicken,” “computer” and “AI”— playing against one other on each display. Visitors can participate in the role of the “human” player.

Tic-tac-toe is also known as one of the earliest computer games. According to JODI, the version of the game that Alexander S. DOUGLAS developed in 1952 was “the first to allow humans to play against a computer.” It is virtually impossible to beat the tic-tac-toe computer program, and one can say that its extreme simplicity is exactly what serves as a power source for today’s technology. JODI consider tic-tac-toe as an important cultural artifact, and created this work in response to its background defined by history and war games from the early days of computing, and at once to such topics as AI.

The “chicken” player refers to the live chicken that played tic-tac-toe in the arcade game “Bird Brain.” Combining a hen that was trained to peck at blinking buttons, and a simple computer program that calculated the appropriate field and indicated it with a
blinking light, the game was allegedly designed in a way that made it impossible for human players to win.