一位科學家制作了一個計算器,計算出了真正的吸血鬼末日的風險
Have you ever wondered how long it would take for the entire world to become vampires?
你有沒有想過要多久整個世界才會變成吸血鬼?
Let say we started out with the set-up from your favourite vampire novel: Do Bram Stoker's Dracula vampires take over the world faster than vampires in True Blood or those in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles?
假設(shè)我們從你最喜歡的吸血鬼小說開始:布拉姆·斯托克的《德古拉吸血鬼》是否比《真愛如血》或《安妮·賴斯吸血鬼編年史》中的吸血鬼更快地統(tǒng)治世界?
Dominik Czernia, a physicist at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kraków, Poland decided to find out, after seeing a paper by an international team of scientists investigating mathematical models of vampires and humans in fiction.
波蘭克拉科夫核物理研究所的物理學家多米尼克·切爾尼亞在看到一組國際科學家的論文后,決定找出答案。
"It was quite a time-consuming project. I started by finding an interesting paper regarding vampires, where the authors subtly suggested the existence of vampires based on real-life data," Czernia told ScienceAlert.
“這是一個相當耗時的項目。我一開始就發(fā)現(xiàn)了一篇關(guān)于吸血鬼的有趣論文,作者根據(jù)真實數(shù)據(jù)巧妙地暗示了吸血鬼的存在。”
"That drew my attention and I decided to test it out in a scientific way with the well-known theory predator-prey model, based on game theory. All of this was challenging and, because I focused on the calculator in my free time, it took me about a month to finish everything."
這引起了我的注意,我決定用一種科學的方法來驗證它,那就是著名的基于博弈論的捕食者-被捕食者模型。所有這些都很有挑戰(zhàn)性,因為我在空閑時間專注于計算器,我花了大約一個月的時間來完成所有的事情。”
The result of all that painstaking work is a fun online calculator.
所有這些艱苦工作的結(jié)果是一個有趣的在線計算器。
You can select which types of vampires you want to start out with, then change parameters such as human population size, the number of vampires, and whether there are any vampire slayers in the mix.
你可以選擇你想要的吸血鬼類型,然后改變參數(shù),如人口規(guī)模,吸血鬼的數(shù)量,以及是否有任何吸血鬼殺手的組合。
"I'm an absolute sucker (pun intended) for 'traditional' ruthless vampires, such as Dracula, but there have been so many interesting takes on vampires in literature and movies over the past years," says Czernia.
Czernia說:“我絕對是‘傳統(tǒng)的’冷酷無情的吸血鬼(如德古拉)的粉絲,但是在過去的幾年里,文學作品和電影中有很多關(guān)于吸血鬼的有趣故事。”
Now, we'll just warn you, in most of the models it is really hard to help the humans win. The vast majority of the time the vampires succeed in completely taking over.
現(xiàn)在,我們要警告你們,在大多數(shù)模型中幫助人類獲勝是非常困難的。絕大多數(shù)情況下,吸血鬼都能成功地控制一切。
But despite that, it's still fun to see how the numbers and graphs tell stories of a human-vampire war.
盡管如此,看到這些數(shù)字和圖表如何講述人類與吸血鬼之間的戰(zhàn)爭還是很有趣的。
"I had to give meaning to raw numbers to build the atmosphere of a vampire apocalypse," Czernia adds.
“我不得不賦予原始數(shù)據(jù)以意義,以營造吸血鬼末日的氛圍,”Czernia補充道。
"It combines two things that I find fascinating: fiction and science. I love it when we can apply mathematical models to even the most surprising things and describing a vampire apocalypse using differential equations definitely makes the top of my list."
“它結(jié)合了我覺得很有趣的兩樣東西:小說和科學。我喜歡把數(shù)學模型應用到最令人驚訝的事情上,用微分方程描述吸血鬼的末日絕對是我的首選。”
And if a vampire armageddon ever does break out, well... now we can predict the outcome.
如果吸血鬼世界末日真的發(fā)生了現(xiàn)在我們可以預測結(jié)果了。
You can play with the Vampire Apocalypse Calculator at Omni Calculator here.
你可以在Omni計算器上玩吸血鬼啟示錄計算器。