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.
媒體上報導有關伊拉克、 阿富汗、獅子山共和國的戰爭, 對我們來說似乎是個難解的問題, 尤其是當我決定要開始進行這個專案的時候。 但是身為一個物理學家, 我想只要你能提供一些資料, 我或許能找到解答,就讓我試一試也無妨。
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.
我這個天真的紐西蘭人就想, 我該去找五角大廈的人談談, 看他們能不能給我一些資訊? (笑聲) 當然不行。所以我得再想別的辦法。 有天晚上我在牛津看新聞的時候, 我發現在螢幕下方有一行跑馬字, 那就是我要的資訊了! 我們每天在看新聞的時候,就有大量的資訊流過, 環繞在我們四週的噪音裡,其實隱藏了重要的資訊。 所以我開始想, 或許有一些公開的資訊我可以取得, 只要我取得足夠的資訊, 或許我們就可以開始瞭解戰爭。
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?
我所做的,是組成一個團隊, 由各種學者專家組成,包含科學家、 經濟學家和數學家。 我們把這些人集合起來,開始嚐試解決這個問題。 我們的工作分成三個步驟, 第一步是蒐集資料,我們的資料來源有130個, 包含非營利組織的報告、報紙和有線電視新聞。 我們把資料蒐集起來,然後做初步的篩選, 我們把最精華的資訊輸入,以建立資料庫。 資料庫裡包含有 襲擊的時間、 地點、規模及使用的武器。 這些資訊都在我們每天所吸收的新聞裡, 問題只在於如何擷取。 所以當我們建立了資料庫,我們就可以開始做一些很酷的事了。 我們可不可以看看襲擊規模的分佈狀況? 那代表什麼意義?
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 didn'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 didn'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.
所以我們開始進行分析。 你們可以在水平軸上 看到每次襲擊的死亡人數, 也可稱之為襲擊的規模, 垂直軸上有襲擊的次數, 當我們把資料點畫上去後, 你會看到類似隨機分佈的圖形 -- 像有67次襲擊裡都有一個人死亡, 或是有47次襲擊裡有七個人死亡。 我們為伊拉克戰爭做了同樣的分析, 我們一開始並不知道伊拉克戰爭的分析結果會是什麼, 但結果非常令人驚訝。 當我們把所有衝突、 混亂及噪音 都排除在外, 我們畫出了這個精確的數學分佈圖, 告訴我們其實戰爭的襲擊是有規則的。 這讓我們大吃一驚。 為什麼像伊拉克這種戰爭 會產生這種圖形? 戰爭怎麼會有規則可循? 我們真的不瞭解, 我們認為或許伊拉克戰爭有其特殊之處, 所以我們又研究了其他幾個戰爭, 我們研究了哥倫比亞、阿富汗 和塞內加爾的戰事。
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 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.
每一個戰事都有相同的圖形, 不應該是這樣啊... 不同的戰爭有不同的宗教背景、 不同的政治背景,就連社會經濟問題也不同, 但是他們所呈現出來的圖形 卻是一樣! 我們將範圍再度擴大, 我們研究世界上所有的戰事,利用手邊所有可取得的資料, 從祕魯到印尼, 我們又看到一樣的圖形, 而且他們 不只具有相同的這條分佈直線, 就連這條線的斜率 α , 都集中在2.5這個值上下。 因此我們得出一條方程式, 讓我們得以預測某次襲擊的可能結果。 我們所說的結果是指 在像伊拉克這種戰爭中, 某次襲擊所會造成 X 人死亡的機率, 這個值相當於某個常數乘上該次襲擊的規模 的負 α 次方, 這個負 α 就是先前提到的斜率。
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 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.
這又代表什麼? 這些是資料、統計數據,他們能夠為我們解釋戰爭嗎? 這是身為物理學家所要面對的挑戰, 我們該怎麼解讀這些數據? 我們最後瞭解到, α 就代表了 叛軍的組織結構。 雖然 α 所代表的是襲擊規模的分佈狀況, 但實際上卻代表 發動襲擊一方的組織力量。 所以我們來看看組織的生態 -- 集中或分散。 這些組織合久必分,分久必合。 所以我們開始分析這些數據。我們是否能夠進行模擬? 我們是否能複製出類似 伊拉克戰爭的圖形? 漸漸地我們看到了一些眉目, 我們可以進行模擬了, 我們可以依據組織生態來解釋 世界各地的戰爭 所呈現出的圖形了。
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 don't find that solution as an insurgent force, you don'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.
接下來呢? 為什麼這些看似不同的戰事, 卻會呈現相同的圖形? 我相信這是因為 叛軍的組織,會隨時間不斷地改變, 這是面對一個強而有力的敵人 所必須採取的策略。 若身為一個叛軍組織而不瞭解這一點, 這個叛軍組織就不會存活。 所以只要叛軍還存在, 只要戰爭還在打, 就會出現這個圖形, 這是我們的想法。
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.
更進一步來說,我們該怎麼改變這個戰爭? 我們該怎麼終止像伊拉克這種戰爭? 這種戰爭裡的 α 值是多少? α 就是叛軍的組織結構,當戰事持續的時候, 它趨向一個穩定值2.5。 我們得改變這個值, 我們可以把它往上推升, 叛軍的組織就會分裂, 叛軍組織變多了,但每一個都很弱; 或是我們可以把它往下降, 叛軍就會變強,但是組織數目會減少, 你可能可以和他們坐下來進行談判。
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 Fallujah 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 don'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)
所以,我要給你們看一張圖, 以前還未曾發表過, 這是我們上星期才畫出來的圖。 我們可以在圖上看到 α 值的演變, 從開始逐漸增長到穩定值, 就像所有的戰爭一樣, 就算在Falusia入侵時期也還算穩定, 直到06年伊拉克大選時, Samarra炸彈攻擊事件 才開始讓系統變得紊亂,往上發展 成為分裂的叛軍組織, 接著美軍增援部隊進入伊拉克。 不管你問誰, 大家都認為美軍增援會讓 α 值更往上推升, 但是 α 值往下降了, 叛軍變得更強大, 戰力也提升了。 這時我在想,很好,時機對了! α 值會持續往下降, 便能進行談判,共同找出解決的方法。但天不從人願, α 值又往上推升了,叛軍組織又分裂了。 這讓我發現, 要不是美軍增援毫無幫助, 讓我們退回原點; 要不然就是叛軍已經分裂到不具破壞力, 美軍可以撤出伊拉克了。 我不知道答案是哪一個, 但我知道我們該持續觀察叛軍的組織, 以便找出正確的答案。 謝謝各位。 (掌聲)