Zombies have become one of the more popular internet memes over the past year and with the upcoming release of Zombieland, a horror comedy that follows a few survivors in a world filled with the walking undead, it seems like this meme is just about as unstoppable as a reeling crowd of decaying brain-lusters banging down your door.

A physicist, Davide Cassi, at the Universit of Parma wanted to know whether or not it was true entities hiding in complex structures (such as a maze or a mall) could survive if pursued by "predatory random walkers".

From the InsideScience.org article:

Cassi found that the likelihood of survival when threatened by predatory random walkers is closely related to how complex the prey’s hideout is. The more twists and turns, the safer you'll be. In structures that are highly complex and irregular, the chances of the predator coming into contact with its target shrinks down to almost zero.

Cassi formulates a model to describe the behavior of randomly moving particles as they travel through maze-like networks. He said that his work could apply to a wide variety of situations including the distribution of information through the internet and medicine spreading through the human body.

"There are a lot of applications of these results in a lot of fields of sciences," Cassi said. "The most amazing field of applications of these results are in biology, biochemistry and other organisms."

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Read the full article here.

Read the research article from Physical Review E here.