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."

Re:Sick of zombies

[digitalunity]

But its on digg, and therefore Slashdot is required to post it...

Maybe I'm trolling here, but it seems like a voluminous number of articles these days are already on diggs front page. Not sure whats so hard about finding new and interesting things to post.

Zombie Modelling

[BrightSpark]

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 [wikipedia.org] Not as satisfying as Left 4 Dead, but it does the job.

Interesting, but...

[russotto]

Until we manage to create real zombies and release them on the population, we'll never be able to test the model.

Ahhh the possiblities...

[ae1294]

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...

Re:Sick of zombies

[Lord Kano]

Sounds like the train of thought the Militia type in Michigan go through.

Or shopkeepers in Los Angeles.

Or anyone who's aware of events that took place in the 1960s.

LK

Spatial stochastic disease modelling

[Spacelem]

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.