🎒 What you need

a big handful of bottle caps in two or three colours
a friend
ground to lay them out on

✋ Do this

One of you invents a secret rule and tells nobody. Something like 'a row is good if it has a red cap in it'.
The rule-keeper lays out a row of caps and says only 'good' or 'not good'. No explaining.
Do this ten times. Keep the good rows on the left and the not-good rows on the right so you can see them all at once.
The guesser now stares at the two groups and lays out a brand new row, saying 'I think this one is good'.
Rule-keeper answers only yes or no. Keep going until the guesser gets five right in a row.
Now say the rule out loud. Were you right? Look at how many examples it took.

💡 Why it works

You just did machine learning. Nobody told the guesser the rule — they worked it out from examples marked good and not-good. That is exactly how a phone learns to spot a diseased cassava leaf: thousands of leaf photos, each one marked sick or healthy, until the machine can guess the rule on a leaf it has never seen.

🔥 Challenge

Make a rule so sneaky it takes your friend twenty examples — but it must still be a real rule you can say in one sentence. No cheating by changing it halfway.

📖 New words

exampleone thing you show the machine, with the answer attached

learnto work out the rule by looking at many examples

🔍

Rule Hunter

Tap when you have finished this module.