Famous 'sandpile model' shown to move like a traveling sand dune
Monday, February 11, 2019 - 08:50
in Mathematics & Economics
The so-called Abelian sandpile model has been studied by scientists for more than 30 years to better understand a physical phenomenon called self-organized criticality, which appears in many real-life situations such as the coordinated firing of brain cells, the spread of forest fires, the distribution of earthquake magnitudes, and even in the coordinated behavior of ant colonies. Even though the sandpile model serves as the archetypal model to study self-organized criticality, questions about its characteristics are still open and remain an active field of research.