The World Series of Hacking—without humans
On a raised floor in a ballroom at the Paris Hotel, seven competitors stood silently. These combatants had fought since 9:00am, and nearly $4 million in prize money loomed over all the proceedings. Now some 10 hours later, their final rounds were being accompanied by all the play-by-play and color commentary you'd expect from an episode of American Ninja Warrior. Yet, no one in the competition showed signs of nerves.
To observers, this all likely came across as odd—especially because the competitors weren't hackers, they were identical racks of high-performance computing and network gear. The finale of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Cyber Grand Challenge, a DEFCON game of "Capture the Flag," is all about the "Cyber Reasoning Systems"(CRSs). And these collections of artificial intelligence software armed with code and network analysis tools were ready to do battle.
