The Mathematical Structure of Terrorism

[mzteris]

". . . The nature of war is a question of great interest to everyone, especially as the era of large-scale conflicts recedes into the past. The wars of today tend to be lopsided affairs, where guerilla forces, insurgent groups, and terrorists oppose incumbent governments. Instead of a few large-scale battles, this situation leads to an apparently random series of small-scale attacks against vulnerable targets of opportunity.

While affected governments collect records of past attacks, the random nature of such wars means that these data are of limited use in predicting future attacks. When classified according to their frequency and intensity, however, the events of any insurgent war appear to follow a power law. It should come as no surprise that weaker attacks are more common than stronger attacks, but a power law distribution makes a much more specific prediction. It turns out that if individual conflicts (for example, a terrorist attack or a guerilla raid) are classified according to the resulting number of fatalities n, then the number of such conflicts occurring in any given year is proportional to n raised to a constant power.

Let’s look at a specific example. In the case of the Iraq war, we might ask how many conflicts causing ten casualties are expected to occur over a one-year period. According to the data, the answer is the average number of events per year times 10–2.3, or 0.005. If we instead ask how many events will cause twenty casualties, the answer is proportional to 20–2.3. Taking into account the entire history of any given war, one finds that the frequency of events on all scales can be predicted by exactly the same exponent.

Professor Neil Johnson of Oxford University has come up with a remarkable result regarding these power laws: for several different wars, the exponent has about the same value. Johnson studied the long-standing conflict in Colombia, the war in Iraq, the global rate of terrorist attacks in non-G7 countries, and the war in Afghanistan. In each case, the power law exponent that predicted the distribution of conflicts was close to the value –2.5. . .

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http://www.physorg.com/news67524254.html

[drm604]

1. Interesting.

I haven't read the link yet, but I'm wondering if that exponent is somehow an artifact of the way they're classifying and manipulating the data. It just seems too weird that it would be so constant.

[mzteris]

2. It just seems too weird that it would be so constant.

When you read the rest you see that a couple of current conflicts are norming up or down as necessary to meet said constant.

Amazing how "mathematical" everything is, isn't it?