Darpa Goes Full Tron With Its Grand Battle of the Hack Bots

On a giant flat-screen TV in an old Emeryville, California warehouse, a floating orb fires red, blue, pink, and yellow beams into a honeycomb of hexagonal blocks. The blocks are black, white, and gray, but as the beams hit them, they change--flashing, fading, absorbing color. And when they do, scores tally just above. On the same screen, from adjacent windows, three commentators provide additional color, as if this was a videogame championship. "You can see who's being owned, and who's doing the owning," says one, a theoretical physicist named Hakeem Oluseyi. The other two commentators are veteran white-hat hackers, experts at reverse-engineering software in search of security holes.