Asynchronous updating restores the law of large numbers in globally coupled systems

Abstract

It was observed in earlier studies, that the mean field of globally coupled maps evolving under synchronous updating rules violated the law of large numbers, and this remarkable result generated widespread research interest. In this work we demonstrate that incorporating increasing degrees of asynchronicity in the updating rules rapidly restores the statistical behavior of the mean field. This is clear from the decay of the mean square deviation of the mean field with respect to lattice size N, for varying degrees of asynchronicity, which shows 1/N behavior upto very large N even when the updating is far from fully asynchronous. This is also evidenced through increasing 1/f² behavior regimes in the power spectrum of the mean field under increasing asynchronicity.