Neighborhood growth dynamics on the Hamming plane (Q1676791)

Summary: We initiate the study of general neighborhood growth dynamics on two-dimensional Hamming graphs. The decision to add a point is made by counting the currently occupied points on the horizontal and the vertical line through it, and checking whether the pair of counts lies outside a fixed Young diagram. We focus on two related extremal quantities. The first is the size of the smallest set that eventually occupies the entire plane. The second is the minimum of an energy-entropy functional that comes from the scaling of the probability of eventual full occupation versus the density of the initial product measure within a rectangle. We demonstrate the existence of this scaling and study these quantities for large Young diagrams.