TED Community » Tomas Perez-Acle

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• A comment on Conversation: Zombie Apocalypse? What would you do, and how would you survive, and is it possible for a zombie apocalypse to occur?

  Oct 22 2012: Despite a zombie outbreak is a highly improbable situation, we have used the zombie imaginarium to study the role that emotional factors -namely panic- can impose on the transmission dynamics of an infectious disease. Thus, we have developed a computational model (rule-based model) where we included as rules, the typical zombie dynamics: susceptible->infected->dead->zombie. In our model, we needed to include 10% of the population as exterminator units, together with treatment for at least 30% of the population, in order to deal with the zombie horde. When these countermeasures weren't included, zombies always won (well, they actually won 97% of the 22.000 simulations!). As we included in our simulations rules and rates that agreed with the zombie literature (i.e.; what are the probabilities that a zombie wins an encounter with a susceptible, an exterminator v/s a zombie, etc), we concluded that, confronted with a zombie outbreak, the survival of the human race is highly improbable. Moreover, our simulations results showed that, in general, to save a person, an exterminator unit is needed. Interestingly, the global dynamics of our model resulted primarily governed by the mechanistic description of local interactions occurring at the individual level. As a whole, people's situational awareness resulted essential to modulate the inner dynamics of the system. Our simulations show that information moves faster that contagion. You can read the paper in ArXiv from Cornell University: http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.4469