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Kind: captions Language: en okay looks like the coast is clear I'm Colin Adams and I'm making this video to try to help you to survive the zombie apocalypse with all the oh hang on a second ah trouble folks real sorry uh not going to have time to do this right now I'll catch up with you [Music] later [Applause] [Music] okay I think we're good let's try this again I'm Colin Adams I'm here in my office I'm a math professor at Williams college or at least what's left of it at this point and I've been out there it is bad out there right now the number of zombies is through the roof it's growing really fast the number of humans is dropping really fast and this idea of numbers changing like that is an idea that comes up in calculus and it's called the derivative so the derivative is measuring how fast quantities are changing in this case we're interested in how fast the number of humans is changing and how fast the number of zombies is changing so let's think about what contributes to the number of zombies at any given time and just for convenience we're going to think of each zombie corresponding to a red lentil so the total number of zombies will just be the total number of red lentils and we're going to call that number Z what can change that number well first of all zombies if they can't find anybody to eat they will eventually starve to death and that will decrease the number of zombies that we have on the other hand when a zombie interacts with a human that zombie either gets sustenance by eating a person or that zombie can convert somebody into a zombie which will also increase the number of zombies that we have so now let's talk about the total number of humans and let's represent each human with a brown lentil so the total number of humans will be equal to the total number of brown lentils and we're going to call that number H now unlike zombies as far as we know humans can have babies and that will increase the number of humans if there's this zombie human interaction the zombie can attack a human kill the human and therefore the number of humans will drop now if there's a lot of people and a lot of zombies then there's going to be a whole lot of interaction that is not going to be pretty I've seen it it is awful ah For the Love of Newton things are looking bad out there don't know how much time I have I mean this situation really reminds me of situations that occur in nature you know think about a wolf population and a deer population the wolves are the Predators the deer are the prey very similar to the situation we're in only the zombies are the predators and we're the prey so let's think back to when this whole thing started and there were lots of people and there were just a few zombies but those zombies had lots of people to convert into zombies and that meant that the number of zombies went up dramatically as that was occurring the number of humans was dropping precipitously and eventually we got to a state where there were very few humans left and lots of zombies now that couldn't last because of course the zombies no longer had people to eat so the zombes started to starve to death until we reached a point where both the number of humans and the number of zombies was small in that situation the humans had a chance to recover and the number of humans started to increase again now unfortunately that meant the zombies again could convert a lot of people into zombies and suddenly the number of zombies started to increase and I think that's the situation we're finding ourselves in now so it looks like this is just going to repeat the number of zombies will go up the number of people will go down the number of people will go up and the number of zombies will go down like an endless cycle going on and on and on unless we can be smart and unless we can overcome them using our brains H wonder who that is yeah yeah yeah what's [Music] up
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