Title
Motors and Impossible Firing Patterns in the Parallel Chip-Firing Game.
Abstract
The parallel chip-firing game is an automaton on graphs in which vertices "fire" chips to their neighbors. This simple model contains much emergent complexity and has many connections to different areas of mathematics. In this work, we study firing sequences, which describe each vertex's interaction with its neighbors in this game. First, we introduce the concepts of motors and motorized games. Motors both generalize the game and allow us to isolate local behavior of the (ordinary) game. We study the effects of motors connected to a tree and show that motorized games can be transformed into ordinary games if the motor's firing sequence occurs in some ordinary game. Then, we completely characterize the periodic firing sequences that can occur in an ordinary game, which have a surprisingly simple combinatorial description.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1137/130933770
SIAM JOURNAL ON DISCRETE MATHEMATICS
Keywords
DocType
Volume
chip-firing,parallel chip-firing,periodicity,fixed-energy sandpile
Journal
29
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
0895-4801
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
3
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Tianyi Jiang1796.50
Ziv Scully274.57
Yan X. Zhang321.57