Graham I, Matthai C C
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Wales, Cardiff, United Kingdom.
Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2003 Sep;68(3 Pt 2):036109. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.68.036109. Epub 2003 Sep 12.
It is shown that the forest-fire model of Bak et al. run on a square lattice network with additional long-range interactions in the spirit of a small-world network results in a scale-free system reminiscent of self-organized criticality without recourse to fine tuning. As the number of these long-range interactions is increased, the cluster size distribution exponent is found to decrease in magnitude as the small-world regime is entered, indicating a change in its universality class. It is suggested that such a model could have applicability in the study of disease spreading in human populations.