Stretched exponential distribution of recurrent time of wars in China

As a killing machine and a decisive factor of history, wars play an important role in social system. In this paper, we present an empirical exploration of the distribution of recurrent time of wars in ancient China and find that it obeys a stretched exponential form. The pattern we found implies that there are undetected mechanisms that underlie the dynamics of wars. In order to explain the origin of this form, a model mainly based on the correlation between two consecutive wars is constructed, which is somewhat similar to the Bak–Sneppen model. The simulation results of the model are in agreement with the empirical statistics and suggest that the dynamics of wars could relate with self-organized criticality.