war and peace J
ust under a century ago a Quaker conscientious objector served during the First World War as a civilian volunteer ambulanceman. By this
decision he ended his academic career, but nevertheless managed to leave behind numerous instances of his name in the academic fossil record. He became a primary fi gure in the origination of several new areas that later became fertile ground for scientifi c computing. He was Lewis Fry Richardson, who died
just as the computers began to appear which would make his theoretical work feasible in practice. His work on fractals was greeted with indifference at the time, but Benoit Mandelbrot would later1
acknowledge it. And his Statistics of Deadly Quarrels2, 3 is a
keystone for modern scientifi c study of peace and confl ict. One of the world’s fi rst peace studies research centres is named after him: the Richardson Institute within Lancaster University, host of this year’s Confl ict Research Society annual conference. Moving up to the present day, my writing of this article was overtaken in topicality by
8 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD FULL SCALE WARFARE
AMOUNTS TO A TOTAL AUDIT OF ITS PARTICIPANTS’
ECONOMIC CAPACITY. IT IS
COMPARATIVELY RARE, BUT SO IS UNQUALIFIED PEACE
Counting on
a fl ood of emails and data streaming in from the laptops of individuals handling rapidly changing analyses from the Maghreb and Persian Gulf. A relatively peaceful change of guard following a self immolation in Tunisia. An apparent velvet revolution in Egypt. A civil war in Libya, which may have played itself out by the time you read this, but is still uncertain as I write. Three points which are, so far, low on Richardson’s scale of ‘deadly quarrels’ (see box) but are intensively analysed for potential trajectories that might trigger other, broader confl icts registering higher values. Things have come a long way in the
years between. The Second World War played a large part in the mathematicisation of military problem solving. It is now
Felix Grant explores the impact statistical software
is having on analyses of war and peace
commonplace to remark that sophisticated modern operational research approaches are descendent from the work of ‘scientists, usually civilians... [who] moved into the precincts of the military, won their confi dence and affected their actions’4
in such areas
as anti-submarine warfare. Population estimation by sampling without replacement from a discrete uniform distribution is commonly known as ‘the German tank problem’ after its remarkably successful application5, 6
to intelligence estimates of war matériel in the latter stages of that war.
By the numbers Data-analytically, both war and peace are now part of an ever-expanding and complexifying social science genre. The Richardson Institute has been joined by a large number of faculties and institutions devoted to peace or confl ict; the best known probably being the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). It is often not easy, these days, to tell the exact dividing line between research driven by military or pacifi st objectives. Indeed, war and peace
www.scientific-computing.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48