Sean Gourley on the mathematics of war

102,291 views ・ 2009-05-04

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00:12
We look around the media, as we see on the news from Iraq,
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00:15
Afghanistan, Sierra Leone,
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00:18
and the conflict seems incomprehensible to us.
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00:22
And that's certainly how it seemed to me when I started this project.
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00:26
But as a physicist,
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00:28
I thought, well if you give me some data,
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00:31
I could maybe understand this. You know, give us a go.
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00:33
So as a naive New Zealander
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00:35
I thought, well I'll go to the Pentagon.
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00:37
Can you get me some information?
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00:39
(Laughter)
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00:42
No. So I had to think a little harder.
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00:46
And I was watching the news one night in Oxford.
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00:49
And I looked down at the chattering heads on my channel of choice.
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00:52
And I saw that there was information there.
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00:54
There was data within the streams of news that we consume.
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00:57
All this noise around us actually has information.
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01:01
So what I started thinking was,
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perhaps there is something like open source intelligence here.
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01:06
If we can get enough of these streams of information together,
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01:09
we can perhaps start to understand the war.
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01:12
So this is exactly what I did. We started bringing a team together,
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01:15
an interdisciplinary team of scientists,
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01:17
of economists, mathematicians.
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01:20
We brought these guys together and we started to try and solve this.
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01:23
We did it in three steps.
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01:25
The first step we did was to collect. We did 130 different sources of information --
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01:29
from NGO reports to newspapers and cable news.
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01:32
We brought this raw data in and we filtered it.
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01:35
We extracted the key bits on information to build the database.
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01:38
That database contained
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01:40
the timing of attacks,
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01:42
the location, the size and the weapons used.
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01:44
It's all in the streams of information we consume daily,
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01:47
we just have to know how to pull it out.
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And once we had this we could start doing some cool stuff.
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01:51
What if we were to look at the distribution of the sizes of attacks?
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01:54
What would that tell us?
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01:56
So we started doing this. And you can see here
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on the horizontal axis
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02:00
you've got the number of people killed in an attack
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02:02
or the size of the attack.
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02:04
And on the vertical axis you've got the number of attacks.
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02:07
So we plot data for sample on this.
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02:09
You see some sort of random distribution --
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02:11
perhaps 67 attacks, one person was killed,
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02:14
or 47 attacks where seven people were killed.
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02:17
We did this exact same thing for Iraq.
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02:19
And we didn't know, for Iraq what we were going to find.
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02:22
It turns out what we found was pretty surprising.
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02:26
You take all of the conflict,
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02:28
all of the chaos, all of the noise,
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02:30
and out of that
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comes this precise mathematical distribution
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02:34
of the way attacks are ordered in this conflict.
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02:37
This blew our mind.
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02:39
Why should a conflict like Iraq have this
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as its fundamental signature?
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02:45
Why should there be order in war?
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We didn't really understand that.
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We thought maybe there is something special about Iraq.
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02:53
So we looked at a few more conflicts.
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02:55
We looked at Colombia, we looked at Afghanistan,
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02:57
and we looked at Senegal.
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02:59
And the same pattern emerged in each conflict.
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03:01
This wasn't supposed to happen.
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03:03
These are different wars, with different religious factions,
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03:06
different political factions, and different socioeconomic problems.
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03:09
And yet the fundamental patterns underlying them
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03:13
are the same.
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03:16
So we went a little wider.
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03:18
We looked around the world at all the data we could get our hands on.
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03:21
From Peru to Indonesia,
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03:24
we studied this same pattern again.
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03:26
And we found that not only
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03:29
were the distributions these straight lines,
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03:31
but the slope of these lines, they clustered around
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03:33
this value of alpha equals 2.5.
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03:36
And we could generate an equation
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that could predict the likelihood of an attack.
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03:41
What we're saying here
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is the probability of an attack killing X number of people
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in a country like Iraq
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is equal to a constant, times the size of that attack,
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03:52
raised to the power of negative alpha.
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03:55
And negative alpha is the slope of that line I showed you before.
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04:01
So what?
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This is data, statistics. What does it tell us about these conflicts?
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04:06
That was a challenge we had to face as physicists.
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04:09
How do we explain this?
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04:12
And what we really found was that alpha,
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04:14
if we think about it, is the organizational
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04:16
structure of the insurgency.
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04:19
Alpha is the distribution of the sizes of attacks,
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04:22
which is really the distribution
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04:24
of the group strength carrying out the attacks.
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04:26
So we look at a process of group dynamics:
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coalescence and fragmentation,
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04:31
groups coming together, groups breaking apart.
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04:33
And we start running the numbers on this. Can we simulate it?
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04:36
Can we create the kind of patterns that we're seeing
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04:39
in places like Iraq?
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04:42
Turns out we kind of do a reasonable job.
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We can run these simulations.
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04:46
We can recreate this using a process of group dynamics
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04:49
to explain the patterns that we see
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04:51
all around the conflicts around the world.
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04:56
So what's going on?
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04:58
Why should these different -- seemingly different conflicts
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05:01
have the same patterns?
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05:03
Now what I believe is going on is that
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05:06
the insurgent forces, they evolve over time. They adapt.
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05:10
And it turns out there is only one solution
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05:12
to fight a much stronger enemy.
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05:14
And if you don't find that solution as an insurgent force,
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05:17
you don't exist.
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05:19
So every insurgent force that is ongoing,
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05:21
every conflict that is ongoing,
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05:23
it's going to look something like this.
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05:25
And that is what we think is happening.
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05:28
Taking it forward, how do we change it?
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05:30
How do we end a war like Iraq?
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05:32
What does it look like?
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05:34
Alpha is the structure. It's got a stable state at 2.5.
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05:37
This is what wars look like when they continue.
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05:41
We've got to change that.
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We can push it up:
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05:45
the forces become more fragmented;
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there is more of them, but they are weaker.
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05:51
Or we push it down:
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05:53
they're more robust; there is less groups;
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05:55
but perhaps you can sit and talk to them.
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05:59
So this graph here, I'm going to show you now.
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06:01
No one has seen this before. This is literally
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stuff that we've come through last week.
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06:06
And we see the evolution of Alpha through time.
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06:10
We see it start. And we see it grow up to the stable state
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06:13
the wars around the world look like.
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06:15
And it stays there through the invasion of Fallujah
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until the Samarra bombings in the
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Iraqi elections of '06.
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06:23
And the system gets perturbed. It moves upwards
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to a fragmented state.
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06:27
This is when the surge happens.
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06:29
And depending on who you ask,
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the surge was supposed to push it up even further.
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06:34
The opposite happened.
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06:36
The groups became stronger.
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06:38
They became more robust.
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06:40
And so I'm thinking, right, great, it's going to keep going down.
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06:43
We can talk to them. We can get a solution. The opposite happened.
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06:46
It's moved up again. The groups are more fragmented.
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06:49
And this tells me one of two things.
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Either we're back where we started
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and the surge has had no effect;
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or finally the groups have been fragmented to the extent
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that we can start to think about maybe moving out.
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I don't know what the answer is to that.
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07:06
But I know that we should be looking at the structure of the insurgency
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to answer that question.
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07:11
Thank you.
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07:13
(Applause)
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