TY - JOUR SN - 0031-9007 Y1 - 2000/10// N1 - © 2000 American Physical Society N2 - We study the properties of the ?rigid Laplacian? operator; that is we consider solutions of the Laplacian equation in the presence of fixed truncation errors. The dynamics of convergence to the correct analytical solution displays the presence of a metastable set of numerical solutions, whose presence can be related to granularity. We provide some scaling analysis in order to determine the value of the exponents characterizing the process. We believe that this prototype model is also suitable to provide an explanation of the widespread presence of power law in a social and economic system where information and decision diffuse, with errors and delay from agent to agent. JF - Physical Review Letters PB - American Physical Society EP - 4851 VL - 85 SP - 4848 A1 - Ciliberti, Stefano A1 - Caldarelli, Guido A1 - De Los Rios, Paolo A1 - Pietronero, Luciano A1 - Zhang, Yi-Cheng AV - public ID - eprints1163 TI - Discretized diffusion processes UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.85.4848 IS - 23 KW - PACS: 05.40.-a KW - 64.60.Ak KW - 64.60.Fr KW - 87.10.+e ER -