This Killer Python Algorithm Can Help Eliminate Terrorists, Says Paulo Shakarian

Well, algorithms are solution for everything! Paulo Shakarian, a scientist at West Point's Network Science Center has developed an algorithm that can help to finish a whole terrorist organization. In a paper presented by Paulo, he has given a simple algorithm, which can tell the intelligence agencies about which terrorist should be their first target while dismantling an organization.

The algorithm works for decentralized terrorist associations. The assumption here is that when some middle level leaders of any terrorist organization die, the leadership tends to focus on a single leader. Now, the idea behind this is that first these middle lever leaders should be finished resulting in a more centralized organization. The centralized organization is more fragile than a decentralized one, so it is easy to finish it.

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The algorithm which is written in python, in less than 30 lines, looks for the nodes with maximum connectivity in a graph. These nodes are the leaders who connect their top management to terrorists at low level. When these nodes are removed, all the low level terrorists are directly in contact with the main leader. In a graph it can be shown by removing the node and merging the incident edges. Paulo checked his algoirthm against five real-world data sets and found promising results. According to him, removing of only 12% nodes resulted in increased centrality of 17% to 45%. The algorithm is adaptable to changes too, if the exact number of nodes is unknown or the number of edges is varying, then also it provides better results. If successfully implemented, the algorithm might be extremely helpful in stopping terrorism.

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