Abstract
The authors introduce a surface growth model where the elementary events are characterized by a waiting time distribution P( tau ). Exact relations to directed polymer statistics and to continuous time random walk problems are established. For P( tau ) approximately 1/ tau mu +1 the behaviour is similar to that of the Zhang model where rare-event-dominated kinetic roughening occurs due to a power-law noise in the surface increments. A careful correction to scaling analysis of the numerical results in 1+1 dimensions indicates universality with the Zhang model for fixed values of mu .