The five intelligence  crowd sourcing programs funded by IARPA had a common structure: a game, with “players”, such as yours truly, who made predictions by manipulating pie charts representing outcomes. Hidden in the bowels of the recycled software that ran these sites was a “market”, so that players were actually buying and selling shares in the outcomes of questions.

Each question had a meticulously devised set of outcomes. The purpose of the meticulousness was to insure that, come hell or high water, the eventual outcome would be one of the choices offered to the player. But the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. In some cases, the question was invalidated, with no points or penalty to the player.

Happily, this has not happened this time. With the capture of Ahmad Khan Rahami, a well-written question would have had a valid outcome. We can now conclude that the bombings were terrorism. If you would like to continue to play the “game”, you may now wish to consider the following subsidiary question.

Is there a cell, or is Rahami a lone wolf? All of the information which has so far been arrayed to answer the original question, about a terror act, can be applied to this new question. As with the original question, your judgment will be formed from consideration and weighting of:

• Forensics, available in open source, such as what has been revealed about the crime scenes.
• Competence of the perpetrator and the technology used.
• The resources of an individual.
• The resources of a group.
• How a group action might differ from one planned and executed by an individual.
• Possible hybridization of the two, meaning, an atypical profile.
• Anything else you can think up.

Have fun!