Abstract
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.
Highlights
The fear of living-dead creatures seems to be universal in the human imagination
The term “zombie” [3], widely propagated in literature [4, 5], games [6, 7] and cinematography [8,9,10], refers precisely to the idea of creatures without selfcontrol, guided by a rampant hunger for human flesh. This word comes from the Haitian folk myth, where it was believed that powerful sorcerers would be able to reanimate corpses, turning them into slaves devoid of soul [2]
We presented two different models that describe the dynamics of a Living-Zombie population
Summary
The fear of living-dead creatures seems to be universal in the human imagination. Many different cultures (e.g. Vikings, Middle-eastern, African, Caribbean...) developed, independently, beliefs in characters that were able to rise from the dead and terrorize living people, either in dreams or in real life [1, 2]. Current media depicts zombies with a more science-inspired approach, treating the “zombie-ism” as a disease-like condition [1, 6, 9], usually with no cure This may take many forms, from a general condition afflicting all people after death, as in [5], to a contactbased infection, where only people killed by zombies become one [4], and even a spreading virus that kills the host and turns it into a zombie, as depicted in [9]. Bies killed by conflict to be permanently removed from the dynamics With this parameter, not present in previously described models, we find cases in which human survival is possible. The different dynamical regimes of the model are described and illustrated by numerical results.
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