A month ago we brought you the wondrous news that Cornell graduate students have used the latest epidemiological techniques to provide advice for surviving zombie outbreaks. Now, they have added an interactive map so you can play Zombietown, changing parameters to witness the effect it has on the undead spread.

To demonstrate the substance behind the moving pixels, Alex Alemi and Matt Bierbaum and their colleagues have submitted a paper to Quantitative Biology, available in preprint on ArXiv.org, under the wonderful name "You Can Run, You Can Hide: The Epidemiology and Statistical Mechanics of Zombies."

As the paper notes, “The idea of a deadly disease that not only kills its hosts, but turns those hosts into deadly vectors for the disease is scary enough to fuel an entire genre of horror stories and films.” Nevertheless, it adds, “zombism...should be amenable to some of the same kinds of analysis and study that more traditional diseases have long benefited from.”

After starting with the spread of zombism through a homogenous lattice, the authors repeated the research using census data for the continental United States to see how unevenly concentrated populations affect the outcomes.

While the previously reported research suggested the Rocky Mountains was the place to go if you want to survive a zombie outbreak long enough to invent a cure, the latest work has an interesting insight into where to avoid: After 28 days, it is not the largest metropolitan areas that suffer the greatest risk, but the regions located between large metropolitan areas. The area with the greatest one month zombie risk is northeastern Pennsylvania, which is susceptible to outbreaks originating in any of the large metropolitan areas on the east coast.

There's no need to take their word for it. Hours of fun can be had exploring the rate at which zombies will overrun districts using three parameters: the kill-to-bite ratio (i.e. the chance a human will kill a zombie they encounter before being bitten), the speed at which zombies shuffle and the number of steps. You start the game by choosing where the original zombie appears.

Screenshot from Matt Bierbaum interactive map. 28 days and a few minutes after a zombie washes ashore in New Orleans, the parameters (top left) see most of the South overrun.

The work has attracted attention from serious zombie geeks, who point out that these are "28 Days Later" zombies, rather than those that allow for the possibility of the dead rising. The simulation also does not allow for an incubation period, which would allow movement by air.

The authors have a serious intent behind their work. They want to teach people about the way infectious diseases spread. Originally, they were hoping to find a way to make classes more interesting for those studying the topic. Now, however, they are addressing the lack of understanding that provokes baseless panic about ebola in wealthy nations, while preventable diseases make a comeback because people don't understand herd immunity.

H/T: Io9