AI Fight Club Could Help Save Us from a Future of Super-Smart Cyberattacks

A new competition heralds what is likely to become the future of cybersecurity and cyberwarfare, with offensive and defensive AI algorithms doing battle. The contest, which will play out over the next five months, is run by Kaggle, a platform for data science competitions. It will pit researchers' algorithms against one another in attempts to confuse and trick each other, the hope being that this combat will yield insights into how to harden machine-learning systems against future attacks. "It's a brilliant idea to catalyze research into both fooling deep neural networks and designing deep neural networks that cannot be fooled," says Jeff Clune, an assistant professor at the University of Wyoming who studies the limits of machine learning. The contest will have three components.