The parts of this structure that stick out furthest are the most likely to capture incoming particles and grow even further, leaving the intervening regions depleted; thus, ``the rich grow richer at the expense of the poor''.

The figure on this opposite page illustrates diffusion-limited aggregation in two dimensions, where the dendritic structure is more evident.

High-resolution simulations in three dimensions, illustrated on this page, are very demanding of computational resources, owing to the square-root dependency on time of the diffusion distance.

Diffusion-limited aggregation; fully three-dimensional


Postscript Version

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