Niall and Cathal here, two Irish guys with an interest in history and crunching numbers. The idea for this podcast came from us having a lot of notions and a few historic ideas.

Our shared interest in military history led us to ask questions like:

"Which was the best army?"

"Who was the best commander?"

or "Can a good general redeem a bad army?"

But how can you answer those questions without doing extensive research and speculation into each army and individual general? Well, we created a neural network (the History Machine!) to help work out the answers for us!

We'll use the History Machine to crunch a database of wins, losses, casualties and other variables in the history of warfare. This provides us with comparative results about armies, commanders and units that we can use to back up claims, discuss upsets and see who stands out from the crowd.