On the limit behaviour of the Bak-Sneppen evolution model

Abstract

One of the key problems related to the Bak-Sneppen evolution model on the circle is to compute the limit distribution of the fitness at a fixed observation vertex in the stationary regime, as the size of the system tends to infinity. Simulations in \cite{J} and \cite{B} suggest that this limit distribution is uniform on $(f,1)$, for some $f\sim2/3$. In this paper we prove that the mean of the fitness in the stationary regime is bounded away from 1, uniformly in the size of the system, thereby establishing the non-triviality of the limit behaviour. The Bak-Sneppen dynamics can easily be defined on any finite connected graph. We also present a generalisation of the phase-transition result in the context of an increasing sequence of such graphs. This generalisation covers the multi-dimentional Bak-Sneppen model as well as the Bak-Sneppen model on a tree. Our proofs are based on a `self-similar' graphical representation of the avalanches.