Field notes / Experiment guide
Can changing one square loosen the tether?
After sensitive patches have been found, does the ant’s return behaviour depend on individual cells within them?
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.
The idea under test
Recolouring particular cells should cause greater loss of home returns than recolouring random visited cells.
What we learned
The fine scan finds individual cells with effects exceeding the random-cell control. Patch-level sensitivity can therefore be localized more precisely.
What this leaves open
Cells were selected from already sensitive regions. This is a targeted follow-up, not an unbiased census of all cells.
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
cell1: single-cell knockout refinement (frontier item 10)
Question and hypotheses (written 2026-10-13, before any single-cell run) are in
notes/frontier-results.md (search "single-cell"); the status row is item 10 in
notes/frontier-status.md. Result there: one cell can cost 4-5% of the tether
(null p99 1-2%); three cells reproduce the 3x3 effect, saturating near 0.15.
Rules: RRRRRLLLLLL, RLLLLRRRRLR. Each run is a deterministic fresh ant, 2^26 steps.
Reproduce
# runs (Rust example; reads legacy experiments/2026-10-12-knockout-maps/dumps/RULE.grid and experiments/2026-10-12-knockout-maps/knock/RULE/refine3.csv)
cargo run --release --example cell1 -- experiments/2026-10-12-knockout-maps/dumps/RULE.grid RULE 67108864 \
experiments/2026-10-13-cell1/results/RULE <three 3x3 window corners>
# windows: RRRRRLLLLLL -7,-10 -7,-11 -5,-15; RLLLLRRRRLR -1,7 1,6 -2,8
# stats (from repo root; reads experiments/2026-10-12-knockout-maps/knock/RULE/summary.json, read only)
uv run experiments/2026-10-13-cell1/scripts/cell1_stats.py > experiments/2026-10-13-cell1/results/cell1_stats.txt
Layout
scripts/cell1_stats.py: summary statistics.results/*.csv: raw scan/null/greedy/lone outputs;results/cell1_stats.txt: summary.- Migrated from root
cell1/anddata/cell1_stats.*on 2026-10-14 (history preserved viagit mv);cell1_stats.txtregenerated byte-identical after the move. The Rust example stays inexamples/cell1.rs. - Still depends on legacy
experiments/2026-10-12-knockout-maps/dumps/andexperiments/2026-10-12-knockout-maps/knock/(not migrated).
Notebook
No committed Jupyter notebook is available for this experiment yet.