Percolation
Hi folks,
The material contained is not a rigorous argumentation about percolation. See this article as a simplistic introduction to the topic of percolation.
What’s percolation?
Percolation is the slow movement of a liquid through a porous material. Take for instance the rain which percolates through the soil, or think of hot water of a coffee maker which percolates through the coffee cartridge.
Percolation is not limited to liquids, percolation can model so many things and is particularly useful for understanding/solving problems related to connectivity.
Percolation is used to model electrical flow in a mixed material (insulating/conductive).
Percolation also applies to social interactions in a network of relationships, for instance if one people is able to communicate with another then the network percolates.
Roughly speaking you can think of percolation as that phenomenon which allows connection/passage through a non-uniform mean/material.
Percolation visualized as a lattice
To abstract the model of percolation you can think of any percolation’s system as a lattice with open and closed sites. For the sake of simplicity you can think of square grid.
Once you’ve visualized percolation as a square grid is easy to see when and why the system percolates.
The question that may arise is: at what percentage of open sites the grid percolates?
The percentage of open sites after which the system almost always percolates is called percolation’s threshold. It’s important to know that there are no formulas to find out that threshold, the only way is to run simulations to determine its value.
The percolation’s threshold varies depending of the shape of the lattice, you can check various threshold here: Percolation threshold — Wikipedia.
The following CodePen is a percolation animation I’ve made, it restarts when the grid percolates. Open it on CodePen to check the code: Percolation animation.
Fin
I hope you’ve found this article interesting, bye! :)
