The Defecating Duck, or, the Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life

599 Except where otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. This essay and another, “Eighteenth-Century Wetware” (Representations, no. 83 [Summer 2003]) are parts of a larger project on the early history of artificial life and intelligence, hence the frequent references in each essay to the other. 1. JacquesVaucanson, “Letter to the Abbé Desfontaines” (1742 [1738]), Le Mécanisme du fluteur automate, trans. J. T. Desaguliers (Buren, TheNetherlands, 1979), p. 21; hereafter abbreviated “L.” This edition of Vaucanson’s treatise includes both the original French version andDesaguliers’s English translation. For the sake of consistency, all page numbers refer to the English translation. 2. Rodney A. Brooks, “Elephants Don’t Play Chess,” Robotics and Autonomous Systems 6 (1990): 9. 3. By artificial life, here and throughout, I mean all attempts to understand living processes by usingmachinery to simulate them. Artificial Life, with capital letters, will refer specifically to the research field that arose in the mid-twentieth century in which computer scientists, engineers, cognitive and neuroscientists, and others have tried to use information-processingmachinery to simulate living processes, such as reproduction and sensation. 4. See André Doyon and Lucien Liaigre, Jacques Vaucanson, mécanicien de génie (Paris, 1966), pp. 33, 61; hereafter abbreviated JV. The Defecating Duck, or, the Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life