In the same vein as the FoldIt project that deciphered a difficult AIDS enzyme, a new DARPA-funded military game will apply the same crowdsourcing approach to refine weapons systems:

The goal is to create puzzles that are “intuitively understandable by ordinary people” and could be solved on laptops, smartphones, tablets and consoles. The games’ solutions will be collected into a database and used to improve methods for analyzing software, according to the draft request for proposals put out by the military’s venture capital and research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

The idea would be that collective action could uncover flaws in the system more effectively. If the interface looks like Critter Crunch, then we’ll be sold.

[via]