Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse: A Population Dynamics Based Approach

Abstract Living-dead creatures are recurrent in various folk myths and recently became an icon of popular culture. The “zombie-ism” is usually caused by an infectious-like disease that has no cure and ultimately inflicts most of the human population, leading to a Zombie Apocalypse. In this work, we propose an epidemiological model for a zombie outbreak. By introducing an infection parameter, we show that human survival is possible in certain scenarios. Furthermore, our model allows for three distinct dynamical regimes, only one of which accounts for the full blown Zombie Apocalypse. Our results are obtained both for a fully connected time continuous model and for a stochastic individual based approach.摘要：行尸走肉类生物在各类民间传说中反复出现，近年来更成为流行文化的标志性意象。“僵尸化”通常由一种无法治愈的类传染性疾病引发，最终感染绝大多数人类，进而引发僵尸末日（Zombie Apocalypse）。本研究针对僵尸疫情提出了一类流行病学模型。通过引入感染参数，我们证明在特定场景下人类仍具备存活可能性。此外，该模型存在三种截然不同的动力学演化状态，其中仅有一种对应全面爆发的僵尸末日。本研究的结论分别基于全连接时间连续模型与基于个体的随机模拟方法（stochastic individual based approach）得到。