一位科学家制作了一个计算器,计算出了真正的吸血鬼末日的风险
Have you ever wondered how long it would take for the entire world to become vampires?
你有没有想过要多久整个世界才会变成吸血鬼?
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?
假设我们从你最喜欢的吸血鬼小说开始:布拉姆·斯托克的《德古拉吸血鬼》是否比《真爱如血》或《安妮·赖斯吸血鬼编年史》中的吸血鬼更快地统治世界?
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.
波兰克拉科夫核物理研究所的物理学家多米尼克·切尔尼亚在看到一组国际科学家的论文后,决定找出答案。
"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.
“这是一个相当耗时的项目。我一开始就发现了一篇关于吸血鬼的有趣论文,作者根据真实数据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."
这引起了我的注意,我决定用一种科学的方法来验证它,那就是著名的基于博弈论的捕食者-被捕食者模型。所有这些都很有挑战性,因为我在空闲时间专注于计算器,我花了大约一个月的时间来完成所有的事情。”
The result of all that painstaking work is a fun online calculator.
所有这些艰苦工作的结果是一个有趣的在线计算器。
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.
你可以选择你想要的吸血鬼类型,然后改变参数,如人口规模,吸血鬼的数量,以及是否有任何吸血鬼杀手的组合。
"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说:“我绝对是‘传统的’冷酷无情的吸血鬼(如德古拉)的粉丝,但是在过去的几年里,文学作品和电影中有很多关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.
现在,我们要警告你们,在大多数模型中帮助人类获胜是非常困难的。绝大多数情况下,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.
尽管如此,看到这些数字和图表如何讲述人类与吸血鬼之间的战争还是很有趣的。
"I had to give meaning to raw numbers to build the atmosphere of a vampire apocalypse," Czernia adds.
“我不得不赋予原始数据以意义,以营造吸血鬼末日的氛围,”Czernia补充道。
"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."
“它结合了我觉得很有趣的两样东西:小说和科学。我喜欢把数学模型应用到最令人惊讶的事情上,用微分方程描述吸血鬼的末日绝对是我的首选。”
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发生了现在我们可以预测结果了。
You can play with the Vampire Apocalypse Calculator at Omni Calculator here.
你可以在Omni计算器上玩吸血鬼启示录计算器。