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Scientists reveal how to survive a real-world zombie apocalypse

A simulation of what would really happen if America was overrun by the living dead offered a few surprises

<b>Cornell University scientists simulated how a real zombie invasion might play out<br /></b>
Cornell University scientists simulated how a real zombie invasion might play out

In Hollywood zombie films, the plucky survivors usually fight back against the zombies - but that is a terrible idea, Cornell University scientists tell us.

The team modelled how a ‘real’ zombie outbreak would pan out, using statistical modelling as if it were an actual epidemic.

The best way to survive is simply to run for the hills.

Specifically, you want to be as far from human beings as possible - so a mountainous region, where you’re unlikely to run into either infected humans or zombies, is best.


The Cornell researchers modelled the situation with a variant of the computer models used to simulate real-world disease outbreaks - but tuned to recreate an epidemic where an incurable illness turns people into ravenous zombies.

'It's interesting in its own right as a model, as a cousin of traditional SIR [susceptible, infected, and resistant] models - which are used for many diseases - but with an additional nonlinearity,’ says Cornell’s Alex Alemi.

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‘At their heart, the simulations are akin to modeling chemical reactions taking place between different elements and, in this case, we have four states a person can be in - human, infected, zombie, or dead zombie - with approximately 300 million people,’ Alemi says.

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‘Each possible interaction - zombie bites human, human kills zombie, zombie moves, etc - is treated like a radioactive decay, with a half-life that depends on some parameters, and we tried to simulate the times it would take for all of these different interactions to fire, where complications arise because when one thing happens it can affect the rates at which all of the other things happen,’ Alemi says.

The Cornell team ran a simulation on a real map of America, with 300 million people.

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‘At their heart, the simulations are akin to modeling chemical reactions taking place between different elements and, in this case, we have four states a person can be in—human, infected, zombie, or dead zombie—with approximately 300 million people,’ says Cornell’s Alex Alemi.

‘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,’ he says – recommending that people should head for nearby mountains if there actually is a zombie outbreak.