Escalators: bane of the dead

So, you’re in the midst of a zombie outbreak. Do you head for the hills, or take refuge in a mall? A new physics paper says that hunkering down in a sprawling shopping center will increase your odds of survival. That’s right, smarty smart people are now talking about zombies.

A paper from Davide Cassi at the Università di Parma, published this month in Physical Review E, explores how targets might be annihilated by “random walkers.” These walkers might be any moving organism that can eliminate a target, but keep in mind that zombies are the perfect analogy for these “walkers.”

The paper examines the likelihood of the targets surviving if they remain immobile within various types of structures. One of the findings is that the more complex the hideout, the less likely a random walker is to encounter a target. What does this mean? Hiding out in a building filled with twisting corridors, such as a mall or a school, offers a better chance of survival than hiding out in the open or in more open structures.

Of course, all bets are off if your particular breed of zombie, excuse me, “walker”, is driven to repeat some of the actions that it committed in life.