Fun with Sandpiles

The following applets are two separate, interactive sandpile simulations. In both cases, we start with square, stable 500x500 piles of sand. The edges of the table are identified with a sink. Clicking anywhere on either applet (with exception of anywhere too close to the edge of the board) will sprinkle sand onto the table causing avalanches. No matter how much sand you sprinkle (assuming you stop at some point), both of these piles will stabilize. Check it out.


Random, stable sandpile

This sandpile is randomly generated.

Hyper-critical sandpile (this one is fun)

This sandpile starts as a hyper-critical pile of sand. That is, individual sand site (of which there are 500x500--each corresponding to a pixel) is at its maximum capacity.

Conway's Game of Life

Beloved ARPers,

I'm learning a new programming language called Processing, and I thought I'd go ahead and share my first applet, which I created by tweaking a few pieces of code found in the tutorials section of the Processing Website. If you hold place your cursor over the applet below, click and hold, you should get Conway's game of life!



Up next: coding sandpiles. It shouldn't be hard to get to sandpile simulations from the code structure I used for this applet, I'll just need to change my updating procedure. Anywhoo, just thought I'd procrastinate finishing up my Unit Plan and share this with y'all.

-James