Sean Gourley on the Mathematics of War
Gourley is a physicist who wants to understand the war in Iraq. They collected NGO's, cable news, and newspapers in order ot make a database of information. They were able to gt locations, countries, how many killed, on what days, what weapons used, ect. They found out, after graphing it, that it has a distinct order unlike when all of our wars were graphed together. However, once they graphed Columbia, Afghanistan, and Senegal separately, they all seemed to follow the same fundamental, mathematical data. They generated an equation of the likelihood of an attach, P(x)=Cx^-alpha, where P is the probability of an event, x is the number killed, C is the constant, and a is the slope of the line on the graph. From this they are capable of figuring out the future of attacks. They found that alpha is the organizational structure of the insurgency. They don't understand, however, why this different conflicts have similar patterns. A stable state of 2.5 is what wars look like when they continue. By pushing it up, the forces become more but they are weaker, or you can push it down where there are less attacks, but much more robust.
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