Zombies ate my Project Made by Lifan Zhang In a world infected with zombies, what are your chances of survival? How does virus spread in a crowded area? What role does the density/the range/the probability of infection play in annihilating a population? There are three kinds of people: White dots : normal people Orange dots : infected people Red dots : diseased zombies The variables to manipulate: World = 50X50 grid Population = 100 Time = 400 Range = 3 Prob_infected = 0.5 Prob_diseased = 0.1 The initial conditions : Randomly placing 100 people in the world Randomly choosing a host zombie among the available population Let the infestation begin! My original plan was to simulate the growth of population, just like the lab we did for the sticky particles in diffusion limited aggregation simulation. However, it would be boring to see random particles (as humans) filling up the screen as time goes on. So the second idea I had was to introduce the death factor. I would first grow my world to a certain number of living organisms, then I’d release a virus, which kills and increases its range of infection as time goes on. After finishing the code, I didn’t think it was very interesting either, since the particles will just die out spreading from the infectious area. I need a new idea. The recent movies on the zombie apocalypse inspired me to improve upon my old ideas. Prepared for UC Berkeley course EPS 109 “Computer Simulations in Earth and Planetary Science”, fall 2009, Instructor: B. Militzer

Zombies ate my Project Made by Lifan Zhang