TITLE: Growing random trees on a lattice $\rightarrow$ Voronoi diagrams
QUESTION [29 upvotes]: Imagine growing trees from $k$ seeds on a square $n \times n$ region
of $\mathbb{Z}^2$.
At each step, a unit-length edge $e$ between two points of
$\mathbb{Z}^2$ is added.
The edge $e$ is chosen randomly among those that have one endpoint
touching an existing tree and the other endpoint not touching
any tree.  Edge $e$ then extends the tree $T$ it touches, maintains
$T$ a tree, and does not join to another tree.
The process is repeated until no such edges remain.
Here is a view of (a portion of) the trees grown from three seeds:

                   


I expected the trees to intertwine and tangle with one another
as they grew,
but instead they appear to be approximating the Voronoi
diagram of the seeds.
Here is an example (of which the above is a detail)
of $k=10$ trees grown within a $100 \times 100$ square:

     


I have overlaid the Voronoi diagram of the seeds.
My primary question is: 

Q1. Is it known that a tree-growth process like
  mine approximates the Voronoi diagram in some sense?

Short of this, I would like to correct my faulty intuition:

Q2. Why do the trees not entangle more significantly
  where they meet?

Finally:

Q3. Are there any results known on the structure of
  the individual grown trees?  For example, their expected height, perhaps
  as a function of their Voronoi region shape?
  (Not surprisingly, the tallest tree ($h=110$) above is the mauve one 
  with root $(61,41)$ that encompasses the upper right corner.)

Although the book Percolation has a chapter on 
"Random Voronoi Percolation,"
I have not been successful in matching their models to mine
closely enough to draw any definite conclusions.

                   


Thanks for any pointers to relevant literature!

REPLY [9 votes]: Update: 
I think your model for growth has been studied before and goes by the name of the Eden growth model (See section 4 of the (linked) original paper by Murray Eden).  It seems what is usually studied is a "site addition" model, whereas your model is a "bond addition" model, but I bet the main results will be the same.  I haven't managed to find any recent reviews focusing just on the Eden model yet (and the Wikipedia page is sadly very sparse), but I found a description of it in the first pages of this book chapter of Jean-François Gouyet's "Physics and Fractal Structures".
Famously, the interface of the Eden model was the motivation of Kardar, Parisi and Zhang when they defined the universality class now known as KPZ.  Here's a nice review of the KPZ universality class by Ivan Corwin.
Thus a lot is (conjecturally) known about this -- in particular, the size of the fluctuations at the perimeter of a single tree with $N$ bonds should scale as $N^{1/6}$ (fluctuations go as radius$^{1/3}$, and I am pretty sure the radius goes like $N^{1/2}$).  Because of this site versus bond addition discrepancy, I haven't found anything about colliding Eden clusters, but I think these ideas can justify that you do get Voronoi cells.  I would be delighted to hear criticism or details from an expert!

I don't have anything rigorous to say yet, but some post-facto intuition for Q2 is as follows.  
Consider the case of a single seed.  I'll tell a story about why the growth from a single seed ought to look more or less like a disk with a wiggly edge, rather than something with a lot of branchy and spread-out fingers (like something one gets out of diffusion-limited aggregation, for instance).  If you buy my story, then it should be clearer why there isn't that much "entanglement" at the interfaces between two such growing bodies.
At a given time step $i$, we have a tree $T_i$; let the set of edges that connect $T_i$ to $\mathbb{Z}^2\setminus T_i$ be $G_i$.  Then we may form $T_{i+1}$ by choosing uniformly an edge in $G_i$ and adding it to $T_i$.  So far, this is just your process in different terms.  Here comes some handwaving.  Any "protrusions" on $T_i$ will not get too long, because to grow a subset of $T_i$ which sticks out a significant distance from the rest of $T_i$, we'd have to had chosen edges near the "tip" of this protrusion repeatedly.  But of course the tip of a long protrusion has a small perimeter compared to the sides of the protrusion, and thus it's much more likely that added edges will smooth out any such features instead of extending them.  
Why does this end up with something disk-like?  Your process is basically one where you add a "protrusion" to the tree centered somewhere uniformly random on the "boundary".  Thus consider the following "off-lattice" version of your process.  Let $T_0$ be a disk of radius 1 centered at the origin.  $T_i$ is the union of $T_{i-1}$ with a disk centered at a point $p_i$ chosen uniformly from the boundary of $T_{i-1}$.  I hope you can see that this is a stochastic version of normal evolution of the boundary.  And as is well-known to doodlers, normal evolution tends towards to circular disks, so "intuitively" a stochastic version will tend to a wiggly disk.  (One complication here is that your process isn't allowed to form loops in the tree, whereas the continuum version I have in mind does).