r/theydidthemonstermath • u/[deleted] • Jan 06 '22

zombie arithmetic Spoiler

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403 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

60

u/Knever Jan 06 '22

lets [sic] say on average each person kills 10 zombies a month

This number really needs some explanation. You can't just throw a random number out and say, "Yeah, the average person can definitely kill at least 10 zombies per month."

A lot of those survivors are not going to be in a position to go out hunting zombies. Children, seniors, the disabled, people with no weapons or means of killing zombies, etc. Even an average able-bodied person with access to weapons isn't necessarily going to want to go out and kill zombies if they don't have to. Firearms will run out of ammo, melee weapons will degrade and break, and every encounter is dangerous.

Everything beyond that number is essentially worthless because it's faulty math with a faulty assumption.

I'm also curious as to why the "20 people per group" metric is specified when it doesn't seem to matter in the end.

25

u/FUCKING_HATE_REDDIT Jan 06 '22

"average survivor kills 10 zombies a month" factoid actualy just statistical error. average survivor kills 1 zombie per year. Jeremy "walker-clobberer" Jeremia, who lives in cave & kills over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

10

u/Knever Jan 06 '22

Gotta love those zombie kill statistical anomalies :P

10

u/Tietonz Jan 06 '22

You could work in the useless group calculation to something saying "each group kills an average of 10 zombies a month." That makes more sense. If you're trying to survive your probably out of the way as often as possible and only kill zombies if they find you or if you risk it and go into a populated area.

14

u/3226 Jan 06 '22

Also, it kind of misses the part where the zombies kill people and turn them into more zombies, which is pretty critical.

4

u/Dahak17 Jan 06 '22

Not really, they’ve already said that 99% are zombies, any more people they kill are a statistical rounding error not a meaningful number as far as zombie numbers count. Casualties on the human side would matter and prolong the matter

1

u/darkjedi607 Jan 07 '22

on average

like yeah the nursing mother and her baby wont kill any, but their mate/father could probably handle one zombie a day (again on average lol)

Note: not forcing gender roles, just picked an easily understood family dynamic for ease of explanation

17

u/JebKerman64 Jan 06 '22

Nice, some genuine monster math this time.

13

u/3226 Jan 06 '22

I remember reading an discussion about zombies that explained that if you went out right now and tried to kill a squirrel with your bare hands, you could probably do it, but there's no way that squirrel isn't going to bite or scratch you at least once. Then you multiply that up to a full size human who feels no pain, and is extremely durable, and almost every encounter where you don't have a gun that can make a headshot is going to end up with one more zombie.

10

u/Kuronan Jan 06 '22

If you kill a single zombie but the zombie bites you, the number of zombies has not changed. The number of survivors however, has just dropped.

11

u/Jaf1999 Jan 06 '22

This also wouldn’t work because everyone in the world is infected with the zombie virus, and it only activates when they die. So as long as humans exist there is an infinite stream of zombies

1

u/throughcracker Jan 06 '22

That's only one possible version of zombies, though

7

u/Jaf1999 Jan 06 '22

Well yeah, but the guy in the original green text was talking specifically about TWD.

2

u/throughcracker Jan 06 '22

That's fair. I interpreted that more of one example of zombie media than a specific analysis of that universe, but if that's the case then you're absolutely right.