ABSTRACT
In his book, Chance and Necessity (1972), the distinguished biochemist Jacques Monod sets out to determine the distinctiveness of living things by means of a contrast with that other class of things – apparently also endowed with properties of form and function – commonly known as artefacts. Monod invites us to imagine ourselves as the intelligent inhabitants of another planet, who are concerned to find out whether there is any evidence of artefact-producing activity back on Earth. We plan to send a spacecraft to Earth, equipped with a computer programmed to distinguish, on the basis of a range of input data, between objects that are artefacts and objects that are not. How should this program be written?
