U.S. JOURNAL about a chicken in Chinatown that plays ticktacktoe. The writer describes how he takes out-of-town visitors to a Mott Street amuseument arcade in Chinatown and introduces them to a chicken who will play ticktacktoe with them for fifty cents. The chicken is in a glass cage outfitted with backlit letters, so that the words "Your Turn" or "Bird's Turn" light up at the appropriate time. If you win, you get a bag of fortune cookies. The writer describes how he uses the chicken story in speeches and essays. Several years ago, the writer Roy Blount, Jr., told the writer that the people who trained the chicken to play ticktacktoe were located in Arkansas and that they had been former graduate students of famed behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner. In 1993, after the Chinatown chicken, Willy, expired, the New York "Times" ran a piece about Willy by Michael T. Kaufman, which mentioned that the chicken had been trained in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The writer tracked down another animal training attraction in Hot Springs called Educated Animals, and then he received some information in the mail about the trainers he was looking for. In 1950, a psychologist couple named Keller and Marian Breland arrived in Hot Springs from Minnesota, where they had founded Animal Behavior Enterprises, which produced chickens that walked tightropes and dolphins that entertained at Marineland. After Keller Breland died, in 1965, Marian Breland married Bob Bailey, a fellow animal trainer. Dr. Marian Bailey went on to teach advanced psychology at Henderson State University, in Arkadelphia. She told the writer she was one of B. F. Skinner's earliest graduate students and research assistants. The writer describes how the whole chicken-ticktacktoe enterprise disappeared from the Chinatown arcade one afternoon. The writer spoke with the "egg-in-stomach" man--the proprietor of the arcade--but he didn't seem to know what the writer was talking about. The writer decided to track down Marian Bailey and get some answers about the chickens. The Baileys are now retired and the writer caught up with them in Los Angeles, where they were using chickens to teach guide-dog trainers the methods that were developed from the Skinner system called operant conditioning--reinforcing correct behavior with rewards and ignoring incorrect behavior until it goes away. The writer describes how Marian Bailey trained pigeons during WWII to guide bombs. Over the years, the Baileys have trained between 12,000-15,000 animals. In the mid-'70s, the Baileys sent out a couple of hundred units of "Bird Brain"--a chicken that could, with the help of a primitive version of a computer, play ticktacktoe over and over again without losing. The Mott Street unit went in around 1974. A few years later, the Baileys took one of their units to an annual conference of the Association for Behavior Analysis and B. F. Skinner played against the chicken, and lost. Most of the time, everyone who plays against the chicken loses. Bob Bailey told the writer about a time at a Las Vegas casino called Vegas World when the unit malfunctioned and displayed a row of "X"s against the chicken. The heyday of coin-operated animal acts ended by the early '80s. It's been several years since the Baileys trained a replacement chicken for a ticktacktoe unit. Only two functioning Bird Brain units remain--one at the Edgewater Packing Company, in Monterey, and the other at the Black Hills Reptile Gardens, near Rapid City, Dakota. The writer phoned Rapid City and spoke with animal trainer Kathy Maguire, who had been trained by someone who'd been trained by the Baileys. The writer realized that there must be any number of people around the country who were taught by someone who was taught by the Baileys to train chickens to play ticktacktoe. The writer fantasizes about a national revival of interest in Bird Brain. He ends the article by imagining a scenario in which he brings B. F. Skinner to the Chinatown amusement arcade and Skinner wins against the chicken.