We present a scaling Ansatz for the distribution function of the shortest paths connecting any two points on a percolating cluster which accounts for (i) the effect of the finite size of the system, and (ii) the dependence of this distribution on the site occupancy probability p. We present...

This brief overview is designed to introduce some of the advances that have occurred in our understanding of percolation phenomena. We organize our presentation around three simple questions: (i) What are percolation phenomena? (ii) Why do we care? (iii) What do we actually do? To answer the...

We review recent numerical simulations of several models of interface growth in d-dimensional media with quenched disorder. These models belong to the universality class of anisotropic diode-resistor percolation networks. The values of the roughness exponent δ=0.63±0.01 (d=1+1) and...

It is known that some dimeric tandem repeats (DTR) are very abundant in noncoding DNA. We find that certain DTR length distribution functions in noncoding DNA can be fit by a power law function. We analyze a simplified model of unequal chromosomal crossing over and find that it produces a stable...

We study the optimal distance ℓopt in random networks in the presence of disorder implemented by assigning random weights to the links. The optimal distance between two nodes is the length of the path for which the sum of weights along the path (“cost”) is a minimum. We study the case of...

We consider the cluster mass distribution between two lines of arbitrary orientations and lengths in porous media in three dimensions, and model the porous media by bond percolation at the percolation threshold pc. We observe that for many geometrical configurations the mass probability...

We determine the backbone mass distributions for bond percolation between two lines of arbitrary orientations in three dimensions. All simulations were performed at the percolation threshold pc. The slope of the power law regime of the backbone mass distribution is dependent upon the angle...

We study the multifractal (MF) properties of the set of growth probabilities {pi} for 3D off-lattice diffusion-limited aggregation (DLA). We find that: (i) the {pi} display MF scaling for all moments-in contrast to 2D DLA, where one observes a “phase transition” in the MF spectrum for...

We discuss recent findings suggesting that an inverse square probability density distribution P(ℓ)∼ℓ−2 of step lengths ℓ leads to an optimal random search strategy for organisms that can search efficiently for randomly located objects that can only be detected in the limited vicinity...

Recently it has been shown that the most efficient strategy for searching randomly located objects, when the sites are randomly distributed and can be revisited any number of times, leads to a power law distribution P(ℓ)=ℓ−μ of the flights ℓ, with μ=2. We show analytically that the...