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Field notes / Experiment guide

Why do the visit counts form a cone?

Ants revisit the centre of their territory more than its edge. Does that radial profile reveal a special return mechanism?

New to these ants? Start here.

An ant moves on a grid of coloured squares. Each colour tells it to turn left (L) or right (R). It advances that square to the next colour, then steps forward. A rule such as RLR is the list of turns, starting at colour zero. On a blank grid the same rule always makes the same trajectory.

Territory means every cell visited so far. Its boundary consists of visited cells with an unvisited neighbour. A highway is a repeating pattern of motion that carries the ant away. A tether means repeated returns to a small home region.

Growing like the cube root of time means taking eight times as many steps to double a linear size. The rotor walker is a comparison model that follows and rotates arrows stored on cells. A seed makes a random starting pattern reproducible; the ant itself can still move deterministically.

We distinguish c, the chance of discovering a cell per boundary step, from kappa (κ), time at the boundary normalized by perimeter divided by area. Explaining their values is harder than using them to account for growth.

A closer look

Visit-density maps for a rotor and ant RLL, followed by their radial profiles scaled by territory radius and visits per cell.
Both walkers revisit the older centre more heavily. The scaled radial profiles compare accumulated visits, not instantaneous occupation. A cone can follow from occupation and growth assumptions without explaining why that growth law holds. Figure source and recipe ↗

The idea under test

A cone-shaped accumulated visit profile can follow simply from uniform occupation of a growing territory and its growth exponent.

What we learned

The cone can be derived under those assumptions. A random-background control correctly fails to follow it, limiting its applicability to the blank-board regime.

What this leaves open

An accumulated cone does not by itself demonstrate uniform instantaneous occupation or explain the growth exponent. The planned square-root turmite control was not run.

Read the evidence and reproduction recipe ↗

Inside the experiment

Methods, registered predictions, exact commands and saved analysis. These are the working research documents; expand them for the detail behind the introduction.

Methods and original experiment record

a3-background-cone-control

Migrated legacy investigation (2026-10-14). Its files used to sit in the flat data/ directory (and calib/, occ/, snaps/, dumps*, knock* where listed) with the label prefix below; experiments/_migration/map.tsv gives the exact old -> new path of every file. This stub was generated from file names and script docstrings. It is not the original write-up: the question, timestamped hypotheses, commands and results are in notes/ (mainly notes/frontier-results.md, notes/frontier-status.md, notes/research-frontier*.md; search for the label), and the producing command is usually in the script docstring or a run_*.sh here.

Old labels / prefixes: a3

Scripts

  • scripts/a3_stats.py: A3 control: visit-density profile of ants on a full random-colour background (experiments/2026-10-13-a3-background-cone-control/results/a3_shape_bg.csv, shape 2

Results

5 entries in results/ (2 are .log/.done markers); csv/json/txt outputs, *_stats.txt hold the summaries quoted in the notes.

Notebook

No committed Jupyter notebook is available for this experiment yet.

2026-10-13-a3-background-cone-control · Source revision ba38590b33e3

Original source ↗ · Input hashes

Introductions summarize the evidence; the expandable record preserves the original predictions, methods and caveats. Figures and notebooks are published as saved. Publication runs no simulations or notebook cells.