Poisson process

Let us assume that you are a college professor. You teach and introductory course, so effectively you have infinitely many students. Any of them can have a chat with you right after the lunch on Friday. Lets say your office hours start around 1 p.m., and end at around 2 p.m.. The problem is that your students are completely unpredictable! But after long years of teaching you have figured out that on average you meet \( 4 \) students each Friday. With \( 95 \% \) confidence what is the maximum number of students that will come to see you?

Forest fire model

One of the classic agent-based and cellular automata models is so-called forest fire model. It is an excellent example of a modeling problem which could, in theory, be solved using standard mathematical modeling tools (such as, partial differential equations), but it would be extremely hard. On the other hand one could use the aforementioned discrete modeling frameworks. So, lets do that.