brAInbender — D.S. Kane

When Ann Sashakovich, starts her junior year at Stanford University, she decides to enter a DARPA-hosted contest to buildthe first sentient AI, capable of recoding itself. Her team's objectiveis to create a piece of code that can hack computers, orkeep computers from being hacked.Two mammoth computers play a game in which one ofthem can maximize its results by cooperating with the other, but at other times, one would have to cheat in order to win...and one of the computers does cheat.A computer becomes sentient when it senses that there isno winnable solution and then searches for others of its kindand attempts to assess their abilities.A group of Chinese scientists discovers how to teleportparticles, then molecules, from one location to another, regardlessof the distance between them.A Russian dictator decides to produce robot soldiers forthe battlefield and then triggers a war to test them out.When these events all occur within days of each other, itsets in motion a competition among the world's most powerfulnations to achieve the ultimate in artificial intelligence. Butwhen Ann sees the inevitable result rising from the debris oftheir competition, she feels she must find a way to end it. Andthe only way to do that is with the help of the sentient computerher DARPA contest team has just created-the one that iscausing all the trouble to begin wit