sandpile

English

Etymology

From sand +‎ pile.

Noun

sandpile (plural sandpiles)

  1. A pile of sand.
    Near-synonym: sandhill
    • 2010, Göran Grimvall, “Chapter 1: Numbers”, in Quantify! A Crash Course in Smart Thinking, Johns Hopkins University Press, →ISBN:
      Are there more grains of sand in a sandpile than there are atoms in a single grain of sand? This is not a precisely formulated problem, because the size of a sandpile is not well defined. The size of a grain of sand is also somewhat uncertain. Geologists usually call rock particles “sand” when the grain diameter is 0.06–2 mm (table 1.8). A crude calculation shows that a sandpile with as many grains as there are atoms in a typical single grain is very big indeed.¹⁶ Its volume is about 10¹⁰ m³, corresponding to a cube with sides longer than 1 km (0.6 mile). The problem thus has a definite answer, in spite of its imprecise nature.
  2. (mathematics, computing) Any of several models in which a series of connected nodes interact with their neighbours according to fixed rules.

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