No doubt you have found yourself screaming at the stupidity of characters in a horror movie. You would never have walked into that room alone, you would always make sure your weapon was loaded and you would certainly always ensure a monster was dead before returning to the corpse!
But what are the real rules that you should live by if the dead should begin to rise? Dr Thomas Woolley and coauthors from the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford believe they have come up with the answer:
- Run! Your first instinct should always to be put as much distance between you and the zombies as possible.
- Only fight from a position of power. The simulations clearly show that humans can only survive if humans are more deadly that the zombies.
- Be wary of your fellow humans.
All of these rules seem fairly sensible, but they are not simply based on common sense. The researchers produced a mathematical model of disease infection and demonstrated that these three rules emerged as the best survival strategy.
The model is based on the idea that the zombies undergo a “random walk” as they slowly shuffle round lurching from one position to the next. In this case your time before a zombie interaction grows quicker if you run away, compared to if you try and slow them down by blocking their path.
What the researchers did not expect was for the speed of infection to depend on the human population, although in hindsight it is obvious; an infection can only travel if there are hosts to infect. This means that if you are surrounded by humans that are not the best fighters then all they are to you are more potential zombies. In such a case your best course of action may be to “get rid” of the humans. However, the researchers would like to make clear that they would not support such an unethical strategy.
This and other articles scientifically investigating a zombie invasion can be found in a new book Mathematical Modelling of Zombies soon to be published by the University of Ottawa press.
http://www.press.uottawa.ca/mathematical-modelling-of-zombies
Although seemingly trivial the maths in this book are the tools that researchers use everyday to understand how infections such as swine flu, HIV and Ebola spread.
Biography
Dr Thomas Woolley works as a researcher in mathematical biology at Oxford and a maths communicator at the London Science Museum. He hopes one day zombies and humans will learn to live together.
@ThomasEWoolley
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