we look around the media as we see on
the news from Iraq Afghanistan Sierra
Leone and the conflict seems
incomprehensible to us and that's
certainly how it seemed to me when I
started this project but as a physicist
I thought you know well if you give me
some data that can maybe understand this
you know give us a go so as a naive New
Zealand er I thought well I'll go to the
Pentagon can't you give me some
information No so I had to think a
little harder and I was watching the
news one night in Oxford and I looked
down at chattering heads and my channel
of choice and I saw that there was
information there there was data within
the streams of news that we consume and
all this noise around us actually has
information and so what I started
thinking was perhaps says something like
open source intelligence here if we can
get enough of these streams of
information together we can perhaps
start to understand the war and so this
is exactly what I did we started
bringing a team together an
interdisciplinary team of scientists of
economists mathematicians and we brought
these guys together and we started to
try and solve this and we did it in
three steps the first step we did was to
collect and we did 130 different sources
of information from NGO reports to
newspapers and cable news and we brought
this raw data in and we filtered it and
we extracted the key bits of information
to build the database and that database
contained the timing of attacks the
location the size and the weapons used
it's all in the streams of information
we consume daily we just have to know
how to pull it out and once we had this
we can start doing some cool stuff what
if we were to look at the distribution
of the sizes of attacks what would that
tell us and so we started doing this and
you can see here on the horizontal axis
you've got the number of people killed
in an attack or the size of the attack
and on the vertical axis you've got the
number of attacks and so we plot data
for sample on this you see some sort of
random distribution perhaps sixty seven
attacks one person was killed or 47
attacks was seven people were killed and
we did this exact same thing for rock
and we didn't know
what we were going to find and it turns
out what we found was pretty surprising
you take all of the conflict all the
chaos all the noise and out of that
comes as precise mathematical
distribution of the way attacks are
ordered in this conflict and this blew
our mind why should a conflict like Iraq
have this as its fundamental signature
why should they be order and war and we
didn't really understand that but we
thought maybe there's something special
about Iraq and so we looked at a few
more conflicts we looked at Colombia we
looked at Afghanistan and we looked at
Senegal and the same pattern emerged in
each conflict this wasn't supposed to
happen these are different wars with
different religious factions different
political factions and different
socio-economic problems and yet the
fundamental patterns underlying them are
the same and so we went a little wider
and we looked around the world at all
the data we could get our hands on from
Peru to Indonesia we studied the same
pattern again and we found that not only
were the distributions these straight
lines but the slope of those lines they
clustered around this value of alpha
equals 2.5 and we could generate an
equation that could predict the
likelihood of an attack what we're
saying here is the probability of an
attack killing X number of people in a
country like Iraq is equal to a constant
times the size of that attack race the
power of negative alpha and negative
alpha is the slope of that line I showed
you before so what this is data
statistics what does it tell us about
these conflicts and that was a challenge
we had to face as physicists how do we
explain this and what we really found
was that alpha if we think about it is
the organizational structure of the
insurgency alpha is the distribution of
the sizes of attacks which is really the
distribution of the group strengths
carrying out the attacks and so we look
at a process of group dynamics
coalescence and fragmentation groups
coming together groups breaking apart
and we start running the numbers on this
can we simulate it can we create the
kind of patterns that we're seeing in
places like Iraq
turns out we kind of do a reasonable job
we can run these simulations we can
recreate this using a process of group
dynamics to explain the patterns that we
see all around the conflicts around the
world so what's going on why should
these different seemingly different
conflicts have the same patterns now
what I believe is going on is that the
insurgent forces they evolve over time
they adapt and it turns out there's only
one solution to fight a much stronger
enemy and if you don't find that
solution as an insurgent force you don't
exist and so every insurgent force set
is ongoing every conflict that's ongoing
it's going to look something like this
and that's what we think is happening
taking it forward how do we change it
how do we end a war like Iraq what does
it look like alpha is the structure it's
got a stable state at two point five
this is what wars look like when they
continue we've got to change that we can
push it up the force has become more
fragmented there's more of them but
they're weaker when we push it down
they're more robust there's less groups
but perhaps you can sit and talk to them
and so this graph here I'm going to show
you now no one's seen this before this
is literally stuff that we've come
through last week and we see the
evolution of alpha through time we see
it start and we see it go up to the
stable state the wars around the world
look like
and it stays there through the invasion
of Fallujah until the samara bombings
near in the Iraqi elections of oh six
and the system gets perturbed it moves
upwards to a fragmented state and this
is when the surge happens and depending
on who you ask the surge was supposed to
push it up even further the opposite
happened the groups became stronger they
became more robust and so I'm thinking
right great it's going to keep going
down we can talk to them we can get a
solution the opposite happened it's
moved up again
the groups are more fragmented and this
tells me one of two things either we're
back where we started and the surge has
had no effect or finally the groups have
been fragmented to the extent that we
can start to think about maybe moving
out I don't know what the answer is to
that but I know we should be looking at
the structure of the insurgency to
answer that question thank you
you