In the 1960s, Donald Michie built MENACE: the matchbox educable noughts and crosses engine. MENACE was built from 304 matchboxes and is one of the earliest examples of a machine learning algorithm: initially, MENACE is a very bad noughts and crosses but over a number of games it learns better ways to play.

In this talk, I will demonstrate how MENACE and (simple) machine learning work using the copy of MENACE that I have built.