Dark side envelopment analysis

A repeated theme in “The Force Awakens,” the latest blockbuster movie in the “Star Wars” saga, is Kylo Ren’s secret fear of not being as “evil” as his hero, Darth Vader. We, as analysts, have the mythical ability to see if this is actually true. We’re going to use the Force – and the standard Simplex LP solver in MS Excel – to see if this is true.

I’ve collected some data on the “achievements” and “failures” that each Force practitioner has seen in his career. (This list was chosen by me and is not by any means all-inclusive.) Next, we’re going to apply DEA, which in the literature means “data envelopment analysis,” but we understand to be “dark side envelopment analysis.” Conceptually, we’re going to pretend that each candidate is coming in for a performance review, and we are going to put his accomplishments – and failings – in the best light for him (Table 1). Everything is considered from the dark side’s point of view. Just for fun, we’re including Luke Skywalker too, because I had friends on that Death Star.

Table 1: Comparison of the careers of Darth Vader and Kylo Ren, Luke Skywalker and Emperor Palpatine. We must remember that while it is tempting to declare Ren the winner because he destroyed four planets at the cost of one base, “The power to destroy planets is insignificant compared to the power of the Force.”

Now pretend that we are actually filling out their annual evaluations. If we knew how to weight each person’s achievements it would be easy, but we don’t know how to weight them, and there’s no good way to find out. A priori, we might presume that destroying a planet (if you’re a Sith) or Death Star (for Jedi) is really good and that losing a Death Star is really bad regardless of what side you are on. However, we don’t know that. So what I propose to do is to let each character pick his own weights for both achievements and failures and compute the ratio (achievement/failure), with the constraint that their weights cannot make anyone have a score greater than 100 percent efficiency.

Each character chooses his weights by maximizing their own perceived “achievements” (positive score), while normalizing his “failures” to be equal to 1. (See technical note later in this article.)

We apply this scheme to each of our candidates, producing (see Table 2):

Table 2: Force user’s efficiency. Each Force user is able to achieve 100 percent efficiency by their own scheme, but they don’t necessarily feel the same way about their peers.

To answer our question: Based on this example, Kylo Ren assesses himself as being “as good (bad) as Darth Vader”; by his weighting scheme (column 2), he and Vader are perfect, and considers Luke and the Emperor to be no-talent Padawans. Conversely, if you asked Vader about Kylo Ren, he would say that Kylo’s journey to the dark side was not yet complete, as he is only about 30 percent of a dark lord. The efficiency metric is not symmetric. Interestingly, Emperor Palpatine thinks highly of everyone except Luke, but nobody thinks very highly of the Emperor.

The weighting vectors are what you might expect. For Vader it’s all about force choking; for Kylo it’s all about blowing up planets; Luke focuses on being an ace star pilot; and Palpatine recalls his nearly bloodless rise to chancellor.

When grading “failures,” we all have to talk about the uncomfortable memory of the Death Star, Starkiller Base or Echo Base on Hoth. And Kylo really needs to work on his temper tantrums.

Finally, just like our world, nobody wants to talk about the computer drives.