Genre: Information/Explanation

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 , well if you give me some data , I could maybe understand this . You know , give us a go . So as a naive New Zealander I thought , well I 'll go to the Pentagon . Can you get me some information ? ( Laughter ) No. So I had to think a little harder . And I was watching the news one night in Oxford . And I looked down at the chattering heads on my channel of choice . And I saw that there was information there . There was data within the streams of news that we consume . All this noise around us actually has information . So what I started thinking was , perhaps there is 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 . So this is exactly what I did . We started bringing a team together , an interdisciplinary team of scientists , of economists , mathematicians . We brought these guys together and we started to try and solve this . We did it in three steps . The first step we did was to collect . We did 130 different sources of information -- from NGO reports to newspapers and cable news . We brought this raw data in and we filtered it . We extracted the key bits on information to build the database . 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 could start doing some cool stuff . What if we were to look at the distribution of the sizes of attacks ? What would that tell us ? 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 . So we plot data for sample on this . You see some sort of random distribution -- perhaps 67 attacks , one person was killed , or 47 attacks where seven people were killed . We did this exact same thing for Iraq . And we did n't know , for Iraq what we were going to find . It turns out what we found was pretty surprising . You take all of the conflict , all of the chaos , all of the noise , and out of that comes this precise mathematical distribution of the way attacks are ordered in this conflict . This blew our mind . Why should a conflict like Iraq have this as its fundamental signature ? Why should there be order in war ? We did n't really understand that . We thought maybe there is something special about Iraq . 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 was n ' t supposed to happen . These are different wars , with different religious factions , different political factions , and different socioeconomic problems . And yet the fundamental patterns underlying them are the same . So we went a little wider . We looked around the world at all the data we could get our hands on . From Peru to Indonesia , we studied this same pattern again . And we found that not only were the distributions these straight lines , but the slope of these 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 , raised to 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 ? 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 really 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 strength carrying out the attacks . 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 is only one solution to fight a much stronger enemy . And if you do n't find that solution as an insurgent force , you do n't exist . So every insurgent force that is ongoing , every conflict that is ongoing , it 's going to look something like this . And that is 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 2.5 . This is what wars look like when they continue . We 've got to change that . We can push it up . The forces become more fragmented . There is more of them , but they are weaker . Or we push it down . They 're more robust . There is less groups . But perhaps you can sit and talk to them . So this graph here , I 'm going to show you now . No one has 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 grow up to the stable state the wars around the world look like . And it stays there through the invasion of Falusia until the Samarra bombings in the Iraqi elections of ' 06 . And the system gets perturbed . It moves upwards to a fragmented state . 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 do n't know what the answer is to that . But I know that we should be looking at the structure of the insurgency to answer that question . Thank you . ( Applause ) </content