MAGAZINE OF THE SOCIE TY FOR SCIENCE & THE PUBLIC MAGAZINE OF THE SOCIETY FOR SCIENCE & THE PUBLIC
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Using math to fight terror
could be a good strategy
Old paradigms never die — they just
create conundrums for slow learners.
In the print journalism world, for
instance, the old paradigm of readers
paying for paper with ink on it has been
eroded by electronic delivery via vari-
ous digital devices ranging from laptops
to app phones. Sure, many readers still
prefer paper, and the best publishers maintain the quality of
their traditional physical product. But sustaining economic
viability will also require strategies that embrace new media
and develop creative methods for delivering credible content
in unconventional forms.
In a very similar way, governments seeking to preserve
national security can no longer intelligently rely only on the
past paradigms of superior military muscle. Enemy forces
are no longer restricted to armies supported by political
states defined by geography. Threats of deadly punishment
do not deter combatants whose strategy often relies on suicide to begin with. Brute force cannot always cope with foes
that don’t fight by conventional rules of engagement.
Consequently, counterterrorism strategists ought to be
interested in adopting some unconventional methods themselves. And, as Laura Sanders describes in this issue (Page 18),
some such methods might be rooted in mathematics. In real-life versions of the sort of thing you’d see on the TV show
Numb3rs, mathematicians have devised ways of analyzing
the organization of terrorist cells, identifying key leaders
and locating likely sites of hidden weapons caches.
Many of these approaches involve game theory — the
science of choosing strategies. Game theory originated in
economics and was made famous by the book and movie A
Beautiful Mind. One of its lessons is that there is rarely only
one right strategy in a competitive situation, because your
enemy could predict it and choose effective countermeasures. It’s almost always better to adopt a “mixed strategy,”
which means choosing with some element of randomness
from among various possible actions.
In other words, game theory says that anyone advocating a
one-size-fits-all approach to fighting terrorism (or any other
strategic problem) is not too bright. So it makes sense that
math should join military might in the antiterror arsenal,
both as an additional weapon and as a way of choosing which
weapons to use. (And it implies that keeping magazines
around is a good idea, too.) —Tom Siegfried, Editor in Chief
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