Look out, human hackers. Pentagon research agency DARPA says people are too slow at finding and fixing security bugs and wants to see smart software take over the task.

The agency released details today of a contest that will put that idea to the test at the annual DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas next month. Seven teams from academia and industry will pit high-powered computers provided by the agency against one another. Each team’s system must run a suite of software developed by DARPA for the event. Contestants win points by looking for and triggering bugs in software run by competitors while defending their own software.

Mike Walker, the DARPA program manager leading the Cyber Grand Challenge project, claims the approach could make the world safer.

“The comprehension and reaction to unknown flaws is entirely manual today,” he said in a briefing Wednesday. “We want to build autonomous systems that can arrive at their own insights about flaws [and] make their own decisions about when to release a patch.”

When malicious hackers find a new flaw in a piece of commonly used software, they can typically exploit it for a year before it is fixed, Walker said. “We want to bring that response down to minutes or seconds. Hopefully we ignite a revolution where we eventually have a machine that can compete with top experts.”