Beautiful Abelian Sandpiles

I implemented this in Rust some years back. It is connected to some serious research mathematics (see f.ex https://www.ams.org/notices/201008/rtx100800976p.pdf)

https://github.com/FredrikMeyer/abeliansandpile

> “…an abelian group is both associative and commutative…”

If something is not associative it is not a group. An abelian group is a group which is commutative.

> The rules of abelian groups guarantee that these identity sandpiles must exist, but they tell us nothing about how beautiful they are.

This has causality backwards—being a group requires an identity element. You can't show something is a group without knowing that the identity element exists in the first place.

In fact, a good chunk of how this article talks about the math is just... slightly off.

Very related (yet idiotically titled, as always) veritasium video https://youtu.be/HBluLfX2F_k?si=6lVPLvJNc2YH_4go

Isn't this single frame state of a classic cellular automata? Note, not "just" because I mean no disrespect. I don't understand how this differs from Conway's life other than nuances of the live or die rule.

It seems the sand only spills up and to the left.

Now I want to redo a bathroom. Good job, writer!