Who doesn’t know what is a zombie? A scary creature that loves brains, right?! Well, in order to better understand how infectious diseases propagate, researchers in Finland have created a fictional scenario. In particular, they are focusing their attention on the shambling undead, aka the zombies. But here’s something much more shocking that’s going to blow the minds of gamers: Back in 2005, a glitch that became known as the Corrupted Blood event swept throughout the online multiplayer game World of Warcraft. Epidemiologists throughout the world took notice of the occurrence because it appeared to replicate the spread of pandemics in the real world.
What’s the right probability for a human winning an encounter with a zombie? The problem is that we’re walking blind here because accurate data on such questions is severely limited, stated Lauri Viitasaari, a mathematician at Uppsala University.
Luckily, it is not an entirely novel concept to investigate the spread of diseases by simulating them in fictitious settings. Studies on epidemiology, for example, have used zombies to pique the interest of medical students. Zombies have also been used to pique the interest of students in other fields, such as mathematics. Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used zombies in 2011 as part of a public pandemic preparation campaign. That’s very remarkable, don’t you think?
New research possibilities
A group of researchers at Aalto University, led by the mathematician Pauliina Ilmonen, have been running simulations of a zombie apocalypse in order to establish how a scourge of the undead might spread over Finland. The parameters of these simulations have been adjusted in a variety of ways. Despite the fact that the complete findings have not yet been published, the models have already offered some valuable insights.
The findings of the recent study might very well be used in the investigation of the propagation of malicious data, rumors, and gossip, as well as the dissemination of false information. The researchers also believe that this could aid in the development of mitigation techniques. As a result, we are now holding out hope that further data will soon be made public!
