Sampling rare fluctuations of height in the Oslo ricepile model

We describe a new Monte Carlo algorithm for studying large deviations of the height of the pile from its mean value in the Oslo ricepile model. We have used it to generate events which have probabilities of order 10(-1000). These simulations check our qualitative argument ( Pradhan P and Dhar D 2006 Phys. Rev. E 73 021303) that in the steady state of the Oslo ricepile model the probability of large negative height fluctuations Delta h = - aL about the mean varies as exp(-kappa alpha L-4(3)) as L ->infinity with a held fixed and kappa > 0.