Project 5 looks at a model for disease epidemics. This is a "small scale" model, which looks at how the disease is transmitted from one person to another. From experience, we expect that disease transmission has an element of chance; you have to meet an infected person, and even then there's only a chance you'll catch the disease.
This model will simplify the issue of meeting people; we'll assume all the people are working in one common area, and a diseased person is equally likely to infect any coworkers. The element of chance will come in when we decide whether infected person I will cause healthy person J to become infected; we will make this decision by using a random number generator.
This is a simple example of the use of the Monte Carlo method for simulation of processes that involve an element of chance or randomness. We will see many versions of this Monte Carlo method in other projects.
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