[HN Gopher] The Math of the Sandpile
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       The Math of the Sandpile
        
       Author : dnetesn
       Score  : 42 points
       Date   : 2021-10-08 16:54 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (nautil.us)
 (TXT) w3m dump (nautil.us)
        
       | randy5 wrote:
       | It's an unrealistic model of diffusion; 4 grains of sand in a
       | vertical stack do not spread out leaving 0 at the node where the
       | stack used to be.
        
         | solids wrote:
         | Nor even spread to a neighbor of the same height, but that's
         | ok, is just an idea.
        
         | Bjartr wrote:
         | The article acknowledges this
         | 
         | < ...real piles of sand don't generate this kind of spontaneous
         | structure. The abelian sandpile model doesn't even try to
         | capture the behavior of actual physical materials
        
       | macrolocal wrote:
       | Super cool stuff. I guess time to convergence is also fixed,
       | since the distribution's second moments increase consistently.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-10-09 23:01 UTC)