Terrorist networks and the lethality of attacks: an illustrative agent based model on evolutionary principles
A data base developed from the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorisms (MIPT) Terrorism Knowledge Base for the years 19982005 was provided to participants in the workshop. The distribution of fatalities in terrorist attacks is, like many outcomes of human social and economic processes, heavily right-skewed. We propose an agent based model to analyse this, and to enable generalisations to be made from the historical data set. The model is inspired by modelling developments in cultural evolutionary theory. We argue that a more appropriate null model of behaviour in the social sciences is on based upon the principle of copying, rather than the economic assumption of rationality in the standard social science model.
agent based model terrorist fatalities cultural evolution mutations