Seven machines entered the competition, and Mayhem won. The field of battle was the Cyber Grand Challenge put together by the Pentagon's future projects wing DARPA, a variation on a traditional computer security tournament. Normally, in computer security Capture the Flag, humans work to repair flaws on their own network while exploiting security weaknesses on the competition. For DARPA's latest grand challenge, the humans let the machines do the work on their own.
Working with support of the Bill & Medlinda Gates Foundation's Grand Challenge to develop field-worthy point-of-care diagnostics for the developing world, a couple of Cornell researchers are mashing up their individual inventions to create a handheld pathogen detector that can quickly diagnose pathogens ranging from chlamydia and tuberculosis to HIV.
