Did goose-stepping troops make a turkey of China's Victory Day parade? Study says rigid formations diminish sense of military might

Using large groupings of personnel in a military parade to emphasise the size of a country’s armed forces could be counter-intuitive and leave viewers distinctly underwhelmed due to the way our sensory perception works, a new study shows.

Beijing held a mass military parade in Tiananmen Square on September 3 to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the end of world war two in Asia, also hailed as a victory over Japanese aggression.

As with similar parades held in North Korea or Russia, its reliance on rigid formations arranged in rows and columns could have lead viewers to underestimate the true number of personnel and equipment on display, the study suggested. It posed the philosophical question "What is a number?"  

China used the occasion to show off some of its new technology as well as its military might by grouping large numbers of personnel into goose-stepping squadrons. It also arranged tanks, rocket launchers and other military hardware in intimidating but orderly grids.

But this may have been a miscalculationmiscal, according to a new study led by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Biophysics.

Their paper shedding light on the subject has just been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States of America.

The researchers conducted tests at the State Key laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, in Beijing, to measure the impact of space distortion on how people use physical information to calculate numbers.