Simulation of the dynamics of sandpiles via cellular automata

Implementation of the Bak-Tang-Wiesenfeld approach of cellular automata for sandpile dynamics. Additional implementation of a customized model. The simulations store the characteristic statistics of the sandpile dynamics such as

• Avalanche duration (equivalent to number of iterations/recursions)
• Avalanche size (equivalent to amount of topplings during avalanche)
• Avalanche area (equivalent to number of lattice sites participating in avalanche)
• Avalanche's linear size (equivalent to maximum distance in between two sites in an avalanche)

In general (depending on memory recources etc.), the implemetations work for arbitrary dimensions.

Usage

The simulation of the Bak-Tang-Wiesenfeld implementation is started with its default parameters by running

python sandpile_btw.py

Optionally, the simulation parameters can be loaded from a setup file like

python sandpile_btw.py --setup example_setup.yaml

Take a look in the example_setup.yaml in the example folder. You can also take a look into the script itself and start simulation from within. The code is rather well-commented so you should be able to easily modify the code to suite your needs.

Required packages

The following packages are required for the simulation:

numpy numba scipy matplotlib

For plotting the (live) evolution of the sandpiles and loading the simulation setup from a file, these additional packages are required:

pyqtgraph pyyaml

Examples