Trees grow, lightning strikes, fire spreads. From three simple rules emerges self-organized criticality — the same statistics behind real wildfires and market crashes.
Forest Fire ModelLive
self-organized criticality
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Trees grow at rate p; lightning ignites one at rate f; fire spreads to neighbors. The ratio p/f self-organizes to a critical state where fire sizes follow a power law — a classic model of self-organized criticality.
Reading this result: Near p/f around 50 the model sits close to its critical point, where fire sizes span every scale in a power law — the signature of self-organized criticality.
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How it works
The Drossel-Schwabl forest-fire model is a cellular automaton: empty cells grow trees at rate p, trees ignite from burning neighbors or from lightning at rate f, and burning cells become empty. The system self-tunes to a critical state where the distribution of fire sizes follows a power law.
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