A Simulation of the Spreading of infectious Disease
“I think the next century will be the century of complexity”
Living in Washington state for a long time, we have witnessed enormous bird migration, Canadian geese, snow geese, and trumpet swans. I can’t stop wondering about how these little birds could self-organized to accomplish such a big project without any central authority. How could their limited ability of interaction spontaneously engage them to such a large scale activity? Complexity-system research promises to find the answer, which set me to the learning journey. Since we can’t solve an equation with thousands of parameters, the best way probably is to simulate; to create the interactions between the individual components in a small scale, and watch the result unfolding in a large scale.
I build my first simulation on how a contagious disease being spread. It uses a very simple rule: put number of people in a confined space, with each tick, a person can walk from 0 to 5 steps, in a random direction. Starting with one infected person in the room, as soon as this person walks into the same grid with another one, that one gets infected.
Please click the image below to go to the simulation page. To play the simulation, click “Restart” then “Move”. You can adjust the number of people in the room, and the simulation speed with the sliders on the page.
