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Insurgent Attacks Follow Mathematical Pattern
Hugh Pickens writes "Nature reports that data collected on the timing of attacks and number of casualties from more than 54,000 events across nine insurgent wars, including those fought in Iraq between 2003 and 2008 and in Sierra Leone between 1994 and 2003, suggest that insurgencies have a common underlying pattern that may allow the timing of attacks and the number of casualties to be predicted. By plotting the distribution of the frequency and size of events, the team found that insurgent wars follow an approximate power law, in which the frequency of attacks decreases with increasing attack size to the power of 2.5. This means that for any insurgent war, an attack with 10 casualties is 316 times more likely to occur than one with 100 casualties (316 is 10 to the power of 2.5). 'We found that the way in which humans do insurgent wars — that is, the number of casualties and the timing of events — is universal,' says team leader Neil Johnson, a physicist at the University of Miami in Florida. 'This changes the way we think insurgency works.' To explain what was driving this common pattern, the researchers created a mathematical model which assumes that insurgent groups form and fragment when they sense danger, and strike in well-timed bursts to maximize their media exposure. Johnson is now working to predict how the insurgency in Afghanistan might respond to the influx of foreign troops recently announced by US President Barack Obama. 'We do observe a complicated pattern that has to do with the way humans do violence in some collective way,' adds Johnson."
I saw this on "Numb3rs!"
Sean Gourley shows that if the exponent is larger or smaller than 2.5, the war becomes unsustainable and ends fairly quickly. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/sean_gourley_on_the_mathematics_of_war.html
I don't see what it is they think they've discovered. If you take a loose collection of 5000 people with a weak desire to cooperate you're going to get way more groupings of 10 than 100 than 1000. The desire for safety in numbers is offset by the risk of exposure by size. In fact I'd have drawn almost exactly their curve if somebody had asked what the distribution would look like.
If the likelihood of an event is a coupled with critical mass of groupings then the event distribution will follow pretty much the same curve.
If somebody understands what it is these folks found could you explain it.
Insurgent: "Hey, chief, there's a big column of Americans coming! Let's skank 'em!"
Chief: "Hold on, let me get out my calculator . . . damn it! I should have paid more attention to the Linear Programming and Game Theory courses at the Madrasah! Go ahead and attack . . . then turn on CNN to see if we got any media exposure. And please bring me some more pencils and paper . . . this mathematically based insurgency strategy *really* sucks!"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
dont work when they know the predictions too. Even if is just to prove that they have free will.
It's actually a much simpler equation for non-guerilla (ie. traditional) warfare.
Take the War in Iraq, for instance. It basically boils down to:
(Crazy Corporate-Controlled Republicans) + (Lust for Oil) + (Mercenaries) + (Hatred for Brown People) = Unprovoked Invasion and War
Modelers claim wars are predictable
Up to a point yes they are, but as Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke so succulently said No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy. I can only imagine that if someone tries to predict a battle they are going to be left holding their graph at the end of the battle saying what the hell just happened?
Cannot find REALITY.SYS. Universe halted.
I don't believe that they have enough data to accurately model the size and time of a future attack - but let's just say for a minute that they did. That information is still useless without a location.
This is a really interesting article. Although the point out the weaknesses of the theories behind the attacks, it is interesting that there is a pattern at all. Perhaps one way to look at this might be the same way we determined the validity of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). Basically, the researchers looked for patterns within certain target groups (e.g., depressed, schizophrenic, bipolar) and detected answer patterns. In the same way, detecting the patterns of attack without attempting to determine the causality might still provide the best predictive power.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
It will be interesting to see if there is any real "predictive" value behind this hypothesis. There's only one way to find out, and that's waiting to see if FUTURE (not past) data correlates with the model. Then there's the whole argument about the model itself changing the way insurgents are dealt with (since I assume the security forces aren't going to sit around and wait for people to die if the model predicts a "high" probability) and thus changing the expected results. And what about people being identified as "terrorists" on circumstantial evidence strictly because of the "higher probability" of an imminent attack?
We may never know if this model is true. As a day trader, however, I can shake my head at people who exclaim they have a new theory to predict the future based on the past. Yeah, er, good luck with that. There's something called "insufficient data". Just wait.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I know that if I continuously flip a coin that it will come up "heads" about one half of the time.
But, that does not mean I know whether the next flip will be "heads" or "tails".
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
The result is cool, and important in the details, but is not that interesting in terms of breaking new ground. As a biologist, having measured countless number of behavioral parameters that all follow power laws, it is not surprising that yet another biological behavior, waging a particlar kind of war in this case, follows a power law. That part is ho-hum.
Similarly it would only surprise me if things like, oh, the size of undergraduate populations at different universities, the number of cars in each country, the number of stray dogs in each city, the average brain mass for each species, or the number of bullets used in any given firefight, do NOT follow a power law. It's just biology. That's the way things work.
And, to keep things in perspective, I'm just a biologist. It could be that all natural phenomena follow that sort of pattern, like the mass of celestial objects, the surface areas of land masses, the percent cloud cover at each point on Earth, etc. The basic idea of power laws -- lots of small versions of a thing, only a few big ones, and a smooth distribution between -- seems inherently universal to my small brain.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Cosma Shalizi rants a lot about scientists' (often physicists') claims about having found a power law description of some empirical phenomenon (upshot: finding a straight line on a log-log plot isn't enough). See the following:
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/491.html
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/power-laws.html
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. -- Wernher von Braun
Publishing this just upset the pattern. Knowledge should not be released to the public as they can use it for bad purposes!! They are just supporting the terrorists, warning them of their mistakes.
( just being sarcastic here.. people are stupid, they will ALWAYS follow patterns, and information should always be free )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
the way in which humans do insurgent wars — that is, the number of casualties and the timing of events — is universal
Did anyone else find it ironic that human solidarity was found in acts against human solidarity?
I wonder what mathematical laws are in play that results in the reported number of insurgents killed during any attack by coalition forces weirdly hovering around 30. Google "30 Taliban killed", or "30 insurgents killed", or "30 militants killed" and you see a lot results going all the way back when the wars were started. See this blog entry http://securitycrank.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/winning-the-war-30-taliban-at-a-time/ for more discussion.
'nuff said.
So, the bloody results of combat can be quantified using a few formulas and tables?
I think a few wargame designers at Avalon Hill are shaking their heads and rolling their eyes right now.
Found this link recently that is purportedly a detailed listing of all the "Islamic Terror Attacks" for the last two months.
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/index.html#Attacks
The site is a strong concentration on only the violent aspect of Islam. It's pretty horrific.
Everyone tag this "psychohistory" or "seldonplan."
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
Consider, for example, the quality and snarkiness of comments on Slashdot.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
So, if we know when they're going to attack, wouldn't we not want them to know that we know? I mean, won't publicizing this just make the insurgents change their pattern? ...military intelligence.
The total amount of attack will/power stays the same, no matter what size the individual attacks are? No shit? I could have told you that too. ;)
Together with other amazing facts, like that the amount of coffee in a can stays the same, no matter of the size and number of cups you fill with it.
I can even predict, that they do not actually stay the same, but in the biggest picture of e.g. one war, go in a curve, first rising strongly, then falling off slowly, only to be re-risen by big events (similar to the scandals / media coverage relationship).
Do I get the Nobel Prize now? ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Let's see. It takes more energy, time, and complexity, to move into place the resources needed for a bigger attack. So, its not really surprising at all that bigger attacks occur less frequently or even obey a power law.
This is my sig.
Umm, try registering? ACs have to wait between posts for obvious reasons...
The same Neil Johnson who did the 200th anniversary time-based Christmas Lectures?
I registered once. I made one post. My opinion happened to differ from someone with mod points. I was thus banned BY ANOTHER USER (not an admin) from posting for 24 hours! (it was a simple technical opinion, nothing political, religious or spammy) I was horrifically shocked by that.
No thanks. Registering results in less free discussion. Remaining AC, at least I can post something. 9 minutes is better than 24 hours, I guess. The censorship here is depressing in its insidiousness. Then the hypocrisy over censorship almost makes it laughable.
Thanks for reading my lowly AC post and taking an interest though.
The value of the exponent is interesting. If one assumes that the smallest attacks happen roughly once a day then the attacks that are an order of magnitude larger happen about once a year. This implies that there may be some sort of calendar event that triggers these larger events. If these events can be identified then it may help avoid some of the large attacks. It would be interesting to check this by looking at the timing of the largest attacks in the data set that was used for this study.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
...that Bin-Laden is really a fractal?
"Hmmm...useless might be an overstatement."
This is why western countries are having difficulty battling fanatics. If you think that there are a few trouble makers that need to be dealt with, you won't win. If you realize that 1 billion people in the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Indonesia unconsciously push a constant amount of marginalized people to commit war crimes, then you can start to win.
Yea, who would have thought that war follows a predictable (even mathematical) pattern.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War
Living in Chile
Where would one go about finding the data they used in their models? I assume they went to the trouble of making it public since they themselves critized governments for not putting their data in the public.
...actually I think it was Karma points... whatever, regardless, random users should not be able to ban other users from posting. At least not on their first day of membership and on their very first post. That is an extremely user hostile environment. I mean holy fuck man!
It is total abdication of responsibility for content. That is what it is. Note how there is no appointed moderators here. That would imply responsibility for content. It is all about the cowardice of the administration of slashdot.
Oh fuck, here we go again... 20 minutes so far this time... makes it really hard to have a coherent discussion, don't you think?
Yup, running a site on perl must suck that bad... it has nothing to do with spam filtering and everything to do with promoting mod_perl. Fuckin pointless.
I'm going to begin the process of submitting this post thousands of times of the next few minutes. Perhaps they'll get the idea fdrom the logs that it just might be more efficient to allow the post?
So the last count is 20 minutes, but I've seen it go as high as 29 before.
Here go, watch your logs there slashdot boys and tell me which is more efficient?
Submitted 100+ times now... I guess what they're saving in perl cpu rapage they are losing in bandwidth, that does not make sense, bendwidth is much more expensive than processing power.
Up to 25 minutes and over 400 submissions.. wow, that's efficient code there, yup.
It looks like we have only another 250 years until it happens again.
Ahhhh, panic. Everybody buy your duct tape.
This is going to make that 200 year was look short.
...if we brought them all home?
is one that my brother noticed vis a vis the earliest days of the insurgency in Iraq. If there is a lethal attack every day, it is organized.
All your database are belong to U.S.
Oh, wait. . .
You're doing it wrong. There's no use in doing thousands of submissions if you don't follow the correct power law. An attack with ten submissions should be 316 times more likely to occur than an attack with 100 submissions.
Power laws are ubiquitous in human affairs - almost everything we do as a group involves power laws. This works for the size of cities and the sale of books and traffic to web sites, so I am not surprised it also happens in insurgent attacks.
Whether that will actually result in the effectiveness of Army tactics is another question, and, frankly, I am dubious. The sale of hit records follows a power law, but knowing that doesn't make me into a better musician.
Well, well look at that, modded down for a good post. So I happen to state my frustration with the slashdot censorship system too. Oops, guess we mustn't let the truth of that out!
*insert "this message was submitted several thousand times and delayed by x minutes" statement here* ...actually, a new record... just past 56 minutes and must well over 3000 submissions...
The really should randomise the position of the submit button to make this harder.
They may have a limited supply (income) of explosives, correlating timing and size of blasts.
and their reward: http://bit.ly/5gL0ll
Maybe if you stopped whining and posted something relevant to the discussion at hand, people would stop modding you down.
Just what we need, another mathematical model show people are numbers and the dead and wounded (wounded; not like a broken finger, but like arm GONE) are only statistics.
6.8SPC TR of 550, l xwind at 6, drift rt at 26" drops 77". AT has 503 ft-lbs at 1403 fps. FT 0.86
It's one of the penalties of posting as AC. Register, you dimwit.
I think a lot of comments above miss a more important point, that knowing the attacks follow a power law distribution (for argument's sake) still doesn't help predict individual events. Really, unless you're placing bets on terrorism (google for "futures market terrorism Poindexter") this won't help you much.
Anyone read "This Island Earth"?
It may very well have been a non-mathematical pattern ... (?)
Rigghtt.... you think I'm stupid? I register, you ban the account... haha real funny, not gonna fall for it.
My original post was bang on topic, but delayed and then ignored, then lifted, you think that is a good thing? I find it fucking offensive, and quite worthy of a good bitch, so fuck you.
Here let me bend over further so you can shove it in deeper. Sometimes it is amazing how stupid smart people can be.
What they are saying is that regardless of culture, location, enviroment decade, reasons behind the conflict, etc., the relation between large and small attacks appears to be a constant.
That wasn't obvious at all.
Solid post. This comment
Can repeated examinations of alpha be used to measure the positive effect of a strategy or is it merely a measure of the temporary perturbation and inevitable return to 2.5 because humans are after all humans and 2.5 merely represents the steady state of humans desire for coalescence vs fragmentation.
is about the best "correlation vs. causation" post I've seen lately.
Correlation vs. Causation has turned into an overused meme IMO-- not around here, just digg and reddit.
Sir you are under arrest for a crime you would be committing in an hour. Our equation said so.
"They confiscated everything, even the stuff we didn't steal!"
"Restate my assumptions: One, Mathematics is the language of nature. Two, Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. Three: If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge. Therefore, there are patterns everywhere in nature. Evidence: The cycling of disease epidemics;the wax and wane of caribou populations; sun spot cycles; the rise and fall of the Nile. So, what about the stock market? The universe of numbers that represents the global economy. Millions of hands at work, billions of minds. A vast network, screaming with life. An organism. A natural organism. My hypothesis: Within the stock market, there is a pattern as well... Right in front of me... hiding behind the numbers. Always has been."
You can fit a curve to one set of data. It does not follow that all other data sets will be similar. There are huge differences in the environments here -- enough to put a BS stamp on this article.
Asimov eat your heart out.
sudo mount --milk --sugar
Media channels have a fixed capacity. There's exactly this much first page in printed papers, only so many minutes of prime time news.
News reports don't depend linearly on atrocities committed, they are a mix where whatever is considered newsworthy is given a portion of the available space.
Mind boggles reading garbage like this offered as at the end of the sentence as if it was a fact.
Do you consider over 80,000 killed within a span of a few weeks (15,000 Germans, over 65,000 Poles) as "almost no resistance"? How about the fact Germany lost nearly 700 tanks and over 500 aircraft in the same short amount of time? That is "almost no resistance"? Where did you learn history?
End anonymous moderation and posting on
for the insurgents. As soon as this analysis becomes part of DOD operational planning, they can choose to attack in ways that don't match the pattern.
Tech Public Policy stuff
You can get a copy of the pre-publication Nature paper "Common Ecology Quantifies Human Insurgency" as well as the more detailed supplementary info pdf at
http://www.mathematicsofwar.com
there is also a list on the site of other important papers for background reading about the research. A good resource to understand the topic. Also of interest is the website from co-author Sean Gourley at
http://wwww.seangourley.com
If the terrorists read this and also have the TSA manual, we're doomed.
Hey OM:
It's not the insurgent's deaths, it's the casualties, which more often than anything, are not insurgents.
So the WTC has the odds of something like 17 million to 1 of happening over the deaths of 10 people, and only 19 insurgents died in all the attacks that occurred on 911.
I keep paying tribute, or taxes as most people call it, so I don't become a casualty.
I am not a mathematician, I tried to check what is a power law. But I have found that : "Vladimir Arnold gave the catastrophes the ADE classification, due to a deep connection with simple Lie groups." It still seems meaningless to me.