The Biggest Identity Sandpiles and How to Compute Them

(eavan.blog)

20 points | by eavan0 4 days ago

3 comments

  • eavan0 4 days ago
    When I wrote Beautiful Abelian Sandpiles (https://eavan.blog/posts/beautiful-sandpiles.html) I wanted to show off some nice images of large identity sandpiles. But the simple algorithm I used was horrendously slow. Showing a sandpile identity that was larger than 100 by 100 took multiple seconds! That's not good enough! I became obsessed with trying to find a faster way, all in an effort to compute bigger and bigger sandpile identities, bigger than anything anyone had seen before. In the end, I did exactly that.
    • eavan0 4 days ago
      The precursor to this blog entry, was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46210044 Shamefully, I somehow missed out on the discussion and can longer reply.

      LegionMammal978 wanted to see a proper description of the identity calculation methods. You can consider this sequel to the initial blog post as an answer.

    • pavel_lishin 8 hours ago
      A few of your links point to the previous Abelian sandpile blog post, but use the `.md` extension instead of `.html`.
      • eavan0 8 hours ago
        Good catch, I've just fixed it now. Thanks
  • agnishom 1 hour ago
    This is so cool.

    Reminds of the 2-player game named "Chain Reaction".

  • 542458 8 hours ago
    I'm getting a PR_CONNECT_RESET_ERROR for this site - anybody else or is that just me?
    • eavan0 8 hours ago
      Let me take a quick look. There is definitely other 2XX traffic, but I'll double check I haven't messed up any configs on the cdn.