Abelian Sandpile

Fully customizable Abelian Sandpile cellular automata explorer.

An Abelian Sandpile is a dynamical system displaying self-organized criticality. It is essentially a family of cellular automata where you have grid of cells that can hold some number of 'chips' or 'grains of sand'. If the cell exceeds its maximum capacity it 'topples' and its contents spill over into neighbouring cells. These cells in turn might topple if they are caused to reach the maximum capacity, sometimes resulting in highly complex cascading patterns. Over time, the emergent pattern is often fractal in nature.

- With this Abelian Sandpile app, you can generate custom rule systems to simulate and explore a massive set of patterns. You can control the capacity of each cell (up to 24 'grains') and how much 'sand' distributes to each of it 8 neighbours.

- You can have sand added automatically in a steady stream to single or multiple locations on the screen, or added randomly.

- Screen will automatically resize to accommodate growing structure.