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    US military to crowdsource software testing with games

    US military to crowdsource software testing with games

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    According to a DARPA request for proposal, the US Department of Defense plans on spending $32 million to develop computer games that will help to test weapons software.

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    According to a DARPA request for proposal, the US Department of Defense plans on spending $32 million to develop computer games that will help to test military software. DARPA says that current development practices result in software with one to five bugs per thousand lines of code, and that the goal of the new program is to reduce the cost of formal software verification (testing). Don't expect something like Battlefield 3, though, since the goal is to create casual puzzle games that are widely accessible. It's certainly not the first attempt to crowd-source information verification — reCaptcha, which verifies words for text digitization, is perhaps the most notable example — but these efforts could be the first support deadly military systems.