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posted by janrinok on Monday March 02 2015, @10:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the we're-doomed-I-tell-ye-dooomed! dept.

Eric Mack reports at Cnet that a team of researchers at Cornell University, inspired by the book "World War Z" by Max Brooks, have used statistical-mechanics to model how an actual zombie outbreak might unfold and determined the best long-term strategy for surviving the walking dead: Head for the hills. Specifically, you should probably get familiar now with the general location of Glacier National Park so that when it all goes down, you can start heading in that direction. The project started with differential equations to model a fully connected population, then moved on to lattice-based models, and ended with a full US-scale simulation of an outbreak across the continental US. "At their heart, the simulations are akin to modelling chemical reactions taking place between different elements and, in this case, we have four states a person can be in--human," says Alex Alemi, "infected, zombie, or dead zombie--with approximately 300 million people."

Alemi believes cities would succumb to the zombie scourge quickly, but the infection rate would slow down significantly in more sparsely populated areas and could take months to reach places like the Northern Rockies and Glacier National Park. "Given the dynamics of the disease, once the zombies invade more sparsely populated areas, the whole outbreak slows down--there are fewer humans to bite, so you start creating zombies at a slower rate," Alemi says. Once you hit Montana and Idaho, you might as well keep heading farther north into the Canadian Rockies and all the way up to Alaska where data analysis shows you're most likely to survive the zombie apocalypse. The state with the lowest survival rate? - New Jersey. Unfortunately a full scale simulation of an outbreak in the United States shows that for `realistic' parameters, we are largely doomed.

 
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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 02 2015, @01:48PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 02 2015, @01:48PM (#151862)

    My zombie action plan always has involved heading to sea. Eat fish for food and set up a desalination system for fresh water. I did not read TFA, but do they mention this at all?

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  • (Score: 2) by tibman on Monday March 02 2015, @02:32PM

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 02 2015, @02:32PM (#151875)

    The downsides are weather vulnerability and visibility. Visibility to other living humans, that is. Yarrr

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by darkfeline on Monday March 02 2015, @03:21PM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Monday March 02 2015, @03:21PM (#151900) Homepage

    Two words: Zombie pirates.

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    • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 02 2015, @03:35PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 02 2015, @03:35PM (#151908)

      That's four words...