Comments | fclbrokle: Zombie Attacks, Foiled By Mathematicians

fclbrokle

Zombie Attacks, Foiled By Mathematicians

Aug 21, 2009 03:58

A delightful NPR story today (now yesterday) on mathematical models of zombie attacks (although hardly the only news story about this). It conveyed a sense of fun in doing mathematics that somehow isn't conveyed by... well, stories about mathematics that seems more "serious." Other amusing observations include that Mathcamp is apparently not the ( Read more... )

Comments 9

meep August 21 2009, 10:35:48 UTC

Hey, if Mathcamp is in Maine next year, I may even be able to teach it.

Anyway, I did try bringing some applied math stuff in, but nonlinear coupled differential equations [I assume this is a predator-prey model... just a tic....I see, a little more complicated than that] do require quite a bit of mathematical machinery to do right.

That said, we could set it up to do numerical simulations, and see if they can figure what's happening, depending on initial conditions and parameter space.

Ah, I see they've got code even. Have they done a mathematica demo of this?

http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/

fclbrokle August 21 2009, 15:14:28 UTC

Not that I know of... I basically know the NPR story and about three minutes of browsing the paper. :)

Applied math has been picking up at camp lately. Miranda did some last year, and there's been more analysis, too. This could be feasible. Not that I know much about nonlinear coupled differential equations either. :)

meep August 21 2009, 15:20:28 UTC

Tivon and I did a bit on numerical methods, but we had to keep it relatively simple.

ODEs/PDEs can be taught at a very conceptual level, but it's hard to do too much without some of the other calculus/linear algebra machinery. Can give a taste, though.

fclbrokle August 21 2009, 18:06:13 UTC

*nod*

Although I think over 60% of camp this year had linear algebra (at least, up to the point of, say, eigenvectors) and an equal number have calculus.

(The comment has been removed)

fclbrokle August 21 2009, 18:06:27 UTC

Eh, I can't see how we'd top 2004's Death Until We Die.

limitedcake August 22 2009, 10:05:02 UTC

I want to hear about this ...

fclbrokle August 22 2009, 19:00:08 UTC

So, 2004 was a run of To Reap the Whirlwind which you played in 2007. It was the most complicated game we had ever run up to that point, and we were worried that the combat system would be confusing. We were also worried that with all those ways to become more powerful (like changing into the half-man, half-wolf form) and with special powers, that people would try to abuse them and attack each other for no reason. (This was a big problem in our early games.)

An intrepid group of campers decided to solve this problem by running a LARP of their own, which they called Death Until We Die. We all got (very impressive) character backgrounds, which were really funny (I, for example, played the role of Dr. Lucky), and then we basically went in and everybody tried to kill everybody else. It was total chaos; once you died, you became a zombie seeking brains, and the game slowly became overrun with zombies. It had something like 50 players, and it used the combat system from Whirlwind so that players could get used to it ( ... )

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