Modeling the effects of diversity on the spread of an infection

Abstract

We demonstrate the effects of diversity in the spread of an infection. Diversity is modeled as a floating point number between 0 and 1 generated from a uniform random distribution, representing the species' tolerance to the infection. The spatial behavior of the spread is modeled via a connection network between the members of the population, free from constraints common in cellular automata (CA) approaches. Different configurations of the network are investigated and in each of these, we show that a high degree of diversity leads to a population that is more capable of retarding the progress of the infection.