IPad game's underlying mission: checking software code
The Code of Plants does more than rack up points - it generates mathematical proofs that automatically analyze additional software for security vulnerabilities.
"The process finds a really solid proof that a particular piece of software doesn't have exposures or vulnerabilities," said John Murray, program director in the computer science laboratory at SRI International and principal investigator on the project.
The Menlo Park research powerhouse developed the game in partnership with UC Santa Cruz, under the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's broader Crowd Sourced Formal Verification program.
Chipping inThe goal of the CSFV initiative is to use the lure of games to harness collective ingenuity - getting many people to chip in to the tedious task of identifying digital vulnerabilities.
By leveraging players' intelligence and ingenuity on a broad scale, we hope to reduce security analysts' workloads and fundamentally improve the availability of formal verification.
Crowdsourcing testThe research arm of the Defense Department, which declined to comment beyond a press release, unveiled the CSFV program last week.
If the games work or can be improved upon, the techniques could eventually be applied to increasingly critical software, like medical systems, communications networks and maybe (given DARPA's interest) military programs.
Within several weeks, users had produced a model of a protein that could help design antiretroviral drugs to fight the spread of HIV, according to a 2011 study in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.
There are already thousands of video games competing for attention - and it's possible that crafting mathematical proofs might not prove as viscerally compelling as, say, slingshotting disgruntled birds at pigs.