Game Theory is an important part of the underlying strategy used by hackers when playing attack and defend Capture the Flag. It’s thinking how your opponent might respond to an event and then planning for it. Knowing when to patch and when not to was part of the winning strategy behind DARPA’s 2016 Cyber Grand Challenge, which was modeled off the DEF CON CTF. 

But what happened the day after CGC at DEF CON 24? That was the day the very best human CTF hackers were invited to play against the winner of CGC, a computer reasoning system named Mayhem. This episode of The Hacker Mind starts to answer the question, can a machine really think like a hacker?