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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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday March 02 2015, @04:06PM
Guns are very useful in most zombie scenarios, as long as you have ammo for them, and you can regularly score headshots. If I was in a zombie scenario, I'd be very happy to own a gun or two. However I'd still want keep at least one Blunt Instrument (TM) handy at all times, and probably a decent sharp one too. Your best friend, though, in any zombie scenario, is a solid building/ compound with high walls / fences and strong doors. While hiding out in a fortified position is a pretty shitty strategy against a canny human enemy, it's not really a bad one against an 'army' of shambling, dimwitted rotting corpses that couldn't outfox (and can barely outrun) a snail. Of course, a lot depends on whether you're talking fast zombies or slow zombies, physics-defying undead zombies or technically-still-living-people-but-somehow-turned into-bloodthirsty-monsters zombies, but in almost all zombie scenarios they aren't actually all that dangerous, once the initial shock and surprise of the epidemic is over and survivors have armed themselves and got organised. The one thing many Z scenarios do get right is that your biggest threat is likely to be not the zombies themselves, but other survivors looking to rob / rape / murder you. Which is another good reason to have guns.