Competition in growth and urns

Abstract

We study survival among two competing types in two settings: a planar growth model related to two-neighbour bootstrap percolation, and a system of urns with graph-based interactions. In the planar growth model, uncoloured sites are given a colour at rate $0$, $1$ or $\infty$, depending on whether they have zero, one, or at least two neighbours of that colour. In the urn scheme, each vertex of a graph $G$ has an associated urn containing some number of either blue or red balls (but not both). At each time step, a ball is chosen uniformly at random from all those currently present in the system, a ball of the same colour is added to each neighbouring urn, and balls in the same urn but of different colours annihilate on a one-for-one basis. We show that, for every connected graph $G$ and every initial configuration, only one colour survives almost surely. As a corollary, we deduce that in the two-type growth model on $\mathbb{Z}^2$, one of the colours only infects a finite number of sites with probability one. We also discuss generalisations to higher dimensions and multi-type processes, and list a number of open problems and conjectures.