Amid the glitz and glitter of Las Vegas, the Pentagon’s secretive research arm held a competition setting bots against each other.
Amid the glitz and glitter of Las Vegas, the Pentagon’s secretive research arm held a competition setting bots against each other.
In a massive conference room at a hacker conference inside a hotel with a giant Eiffel Tower on top, celebrity astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi is taking on an unusual gig: hosting a real-time cybersecurity contest where automated bots compete instead of humans. The room is packed with thousands of onlookers because DARPA—the Pentagon’s highly secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—wants private industry to develop autonomous cybersecurity tools to do things humans can’t or won’t. At the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge, millions of dollars in prize money is being given away to contestants who range from wonky university researchers to employees of some of the world’s biggest defense contractors.
