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."

Comments

Re:Uhuh

[2.7182]

Warning - a lot of things look like they follow a power law. You need a lot of data to be sure.

I must be missing something

[belthize]

    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.

Re:Uhuh

[TheLink]

Sure, but barring nukes and WMDs, it should be expected that it's harder for a group to kill 100 people in one incident, than it is for them to kill 10 people.

So I'm not sure how useful this pattern is.

My dinner spending patterns might follow a mathematical pattern too. I spend 10 bucks on dinner a lot more often than I spend 100 bucks. Whoopee.

Re:There was a TED talk on this

[foobsr]

In conclusion (and most remarkably) the data in his data set show a strong correlation across "insurgencies".

Which may lead to the conclusion that the 'law' that he found describes his inclusion concept (friendly version).
or
He fine-tuned his inclusion algorithm to the point that he could publish a valid 'law' and thus be eligible for DHS funding (reality insurges).

CC.