The WikiLeaks info-dumps, as a lot of the public realized as
they started to be released, contained a whole lot of info--both
genuine nuggets of military action and wartime marginalia. But
by cataloguing all of the events logged in the WikiLeaks Afghan
War Diary--91,000 reports from 2004 to 2010--researchers from
the University of Edinburg have been able to accurately map the
past of the conflict, which could lead to predicting the
conflict into the future. In a paper from the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, the researchers explain how they
were able to statistically model conflicts from before 2009,
then use the WikiLeaks data to predict the intensity of
conflicts in 2010. In other words, they made decent predictions
of the future, even if that future was already in the past
(slightly confusing, but yeah). And it could have been even
better: the predictions were made without observing military
planning or political events, which could help hone the
predictions. Of course, it's not an absolut