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A Mathematical Model For a Spreading Zombie Infestation
cloude-pottier writes "What do you do when zombies attack? Turn to a mathematician to come up with a model for the spread of a zombie infestation, of course! Students at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa have published a paper in a book titled Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress detailing how to model the spread of a zombie population and various complications in managing the spread of the infestation. They even give humans a fighting chance in some cases! The original paper (PDF) can be found at their professor's website."
Prior art: http://kevan.org/proce55ing/zombies/
I am officially sick of the concept of zombies. Yes, they used to be cool and frightening, but nowadays, they're everywhere. In video games (Left 4 Dead, Dead Rising, Plants vs. Zombies (what the heck?), etc.), lots of movies (movies about Nazi zombies, Woody Harrelson versus zombies, even another Romero movie), comics books (Marvel Zombies), and even classic literature (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies?). Now they're in math too?
It's time that someone called for a moratorium (no pun intended) on zombies in the media.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
http://xkcd.com/135/
Many of today's top models look like zombies. :-p
I have had many zombies on my unix systems and Wikipedia here shows how to kill them..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_process
Not as satisfying as Left 4 Dead, but it does the job.
Until we manage to create real zombies and release them on the population, we'll never be able to test the model.
It grow fast but always is limited by the absolute numbers of installed windows PC.
The key difference between the models presented here and other models of infectious disease is that the dead can come back to life. Clearly, this is an unlikely scenario if taken literally, but possible real-life applications may include allegiance to political parties, or diseases with a dormant infection.
Did anyone else RTFA? Note the bold part... I always knew there was more to political fandom than met the eye. Apparently it involves your brain being consumed...
Once we get done reforming healthcare, perhaps someone could pass this up to Obama and get a plan for a zombie infestation drawn up. Never a bad idea to have one of those...
Unfortunately, after reading this study there seem to be several missing elements:
1. zombie speed and effectiveness. Are these 28 Days Later psycho zombies or Shaun of the Dead shambling loser zombies? And sure, they modeled an "encounter" but it's a simple one-on-one winner takes all. Any good zombistician knows most zombie encounters are between a small band of survivors and a horde. It needs to be modeled!
2. It appears that any individual can transition between the "Zombie" and "Removed" state. There needs to be a 4th (end) state: "Brains Splattered By Shotgun".
3. Bruce Campbell.
The senior author is a professor at the university I attend--he is a super nice guy and does very interesting non-zombie related research too.
Consider a spherical zombie in simple harmonic motion...
Modelling a zombie outbreak?
That's entirely similar to the work I've been doing for the last year, modelling the spread of a disease among an animal population. I've been trying to work out under what situations culling will lead to an increase in the number of infecteds.
So, if I name the particular species I've been working on "zombies", and adjust some of the parameters, I've got an SI model that is not only very similar to this, but also includes spatial structure and stochasticity, which is crucial for describing the stability of the disease, and modelling the spread when the population size is low.