Physicist’s Fool-Proof War Formula (Just Add Media Accounts)

[The Straight Story]

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Physicist’s Fool-Proof War Formula (Just Add Media Accounts)


The military has been trying for years to turn the chaos of war into a simple math problem. So far, those efforts have been trumped by a confluence of shaky variables: free will, tribal factions and chance being a few examples. But one physicist says he’s cracked the code. How’d he do it? He turned on the TV.

Sean Gourley, a New Zealander with a background in nanoscale lasers, just finished a fellowship at Oxford, where he spent five years trying to pare war down to mathematical principles. Gourley wanted to find a consistent relationship between the size and structure of insurgency groups and the fatality of their attacks. This year, his work caught the attention of TED - the organization went so far as to credit him with discovering “the hidden mathematical patterns of warfare” - and he recently summed up several years of number crunching in a seven-minute TED-sponsored lecture.

Thank a war-fueled TV news ticker for Gourley’s epiphany. “There’s open source data here, and I thought we could grab it and use it to understand war,” Gourley tells Danger Room. For his research, Gourley collected data on the Iraq conflict from 130 different media sources, including American networks like CNN and international outlets like Al-Jazeera.

Reports in hand, Gourley and his colleagues compared the relationship between the frequency of attacks and the number of fatalities, and found a common mathematical distribution. The pattern emerged in studies of Colombia, Senegal, Afghanistan, and a handful of other modern conflicts. Same pattern, same graphical slope of 2.5. This “Alpha factor” represents the organizational structure (group size and strength) of wartime insurgencies.

With numbers crunched and graphs plotted, war became a single equation:

Probability of X people killed = C(x)^-2.5

It looks tidy, but Gourley ran into one little problem when he tried to put the formula to work: It didn’t. In his TED presentation, he admits he erred in predicting the outcome of 2007’s military surge in Iraq using his data. Gourley anticipated that the surge would push Alpha up, creating weaker, more fragmented insurgencies. It didn’t. Alpha shot down, and then stabilized to pre-2007 levels. Dr. Adam Russell, a D.C.-based social anthropologist, says this unpredictability is the root of the problem: “This Alpha factor is just observational – if it’s real at all.”

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/05/physicists-fool-proof-war-forumla-just-add-media-accounts/