Three mechanisms for power laws on the Cayley tree

Abstract

We compare preferential growth, critical phase transitions, and highly optimized tolerance (HOT) as mechanisms for generating power laws in the familiar and analytically tractable context of lattice percolation and forest fire models on the Cayley tree. All three mechanisms have been widely discussed in the context of complexity in natural and technological systems. This parallel study enables direct comparison of the mechanisms and associated lattice solutions. Criticality fits most naturally into the category of random processes, where power laws are a consequence of fluctuations in an ensemble with no intrinsic scale. The power laws in preferential growth can be understood in the context of competing exponential growth and decay processes. HOT generalizes this functional mechanism involving exponentials of exponentials to a broader class of nonexponential functions, which arise from optimization.