White hat hacker AI bots prepare for DARPA's DEF CON cyber brawl
The research wing of the US military has picked the seven teams who will compete to build machine-learning software that can find and patch bugs automatically to fend off hackers.
The DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge will be held at the DEF CON hacking conference next month. The agency has put up $2m in prize money in the unlikely event of a team building a system that can not only find flaws but write its own patches and deploy them without crashing.
The competition was inspired by DARPA's 2004 Grand Challenge to build a self-driving car. While that competition was initially a failure – with no car lasting more than eight miles before crashing out – the research inspired Google and others to build automated vehicles that have since clocked up millions of miles of travel.
