Even for the experts, lines of computer code can be tedious to read. But what if it all looked like a video-game world, or like a rendering of the stars in space?

DARPA, the U.S. military's research arm, has been working on a way to visualize the Internet and other computer networks. The idea is to make it easier for everyone, even non-coders, to know immediately when a network is under cyber attack. Right now, to look for signs of attacks, trained programmers need to look for sometimes small inconsistencies in hundreds of lines of text. With a visual system, a breach in data security could look like an on-screen explosion, for example, while pieces of defensive code could be illustrated as blocks people can click and drag.