KILLER APP

摘要

It Was while finishing his PhD on the mating behaviour of sticklebacks that Steven Le Comber found himself drawn to a life of crime. Le Comber was reading a 2003 interview in New Scientist with Kim Rossmo, a Canadian cop-turned-researcher whose mathematical methods for tracking down serial killers were earning him a reputation as a latter-day Sherlock Holmes. Rossmo's insight was that felons, by and large, aren't complicated characters. "Most criminals aren't Hannibal Lecters," he says. Often they act instinctively, making it possible to spot patterns in their actions. By studying hundreds of cases, Rossmo found that serial killers rarely target victims too close to home. But they are unlikely to kill a long way from home either: beyond a certain distance, the likelihood of a crime decays steeply, like an inverse power curve.