RunTheSim
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critical systems

Forest Fire
Power Law

Trees regrow quietly. Lightning strikes rarely. Most sparks die within one cell. A few turn the whole grid to ash. The trigger is tiny. The system state is the real story.

Trees Burning Empty Recent burn

recent fires

Many small, few huge

Rolling bars track the last completed fire events. In the critical regime, most bars stay tiny — a few suddenly tower over the rest. That shape is the power law.

What's happening Empty cells regrow into trees. Rare lightning ignites them. Connected clusters decide how big the next fire gets.
What to try Use the critical preset. Let the forest densify. Trigger one manual burst. Watch how different the cascade can be.
Why it matters Large events come from system connectivity, not larger triggers. The shape is the same for blackouts, earthquakes, markets.

source notes

Model level and refs

  • Cellular automaton tuned for strong visual cascades — not a wildfire forecast.
  • Illustrates criticality and power-law-like event sizes, inspired by Drossel and Schwabl (1992).
  • Recent-fire bars show event-size intuition — not a formal statistical fit.