The super computer that could have located Bin Laden?

Nautilus has been presented as the super computer capable of predicting major global events. It could have located Bin Laden’s hiding spot… to within a 200 km radius.

Installed at the University of Tennessee in the United States, the super computer Nautilus comes with 8.2 teraflops of processing power. Having said this, Nautilus is far from being at the speeds of the current Top 500 leader. The first place in processing speeds is occupied by the Japanese K computer, with 8.162 petaflops.

Through a study, Nautilus was input with more than 100 million articles from English newspapers and government reports from the Open Source Center to evaluate its calculation capabilities.

Nautilus analysed two types of information: mood (articles with good or bad news) and geographic location (linked to attempted events). Using specific requests, Nautilus generated graphs for different countries that had uprisings.

These graphs pointed out that for each situation that degenerated due to national unease, the uprisings followed. An experiment was also conducted using the global newspaper reports about where Osama Bin Laden could be hiding.

While a single article mentioned the city of Abbottabad in the north of Pakistan before American Special Forces discovered Osama Bin Laden, Nautilus had located him to within a 200 km radius of the city.

According to researcher Kalev Leetaru from the I-CHASS (Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science) in Illinois, the next step is to adapt the system to work in real time.