Field notes / Experiment guide
Why are the sensitive patches on one side of home?
A tether’s sensitive cells appear in a one-sided lobe. Is that orientation fixed by the rule or inherited from the particular colour field?
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
Comparing field ages can distinguish a fixed compass preference from a lobe that moves with the field’s history.
What we learned
Across usable ages the lobe is field-tied rather than rule-fixed. A rotation with the ant’s heading corrected serves as an instrument check.
What this leaves open
The first rotated comparison was invalid because its heading was not rotated. Exact rotational covariance is a check, not an independent mechanism test.
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
e1-one-sided-hot-region
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: dumps, e1, e1c, knock, run
Scripts
scripts/e1_map.py: E1: knockout coarse map on an arbitrary grid file (same protocol as knockout.py coarse: every 5x5 tile with >= 5 visited cells,scripts/e1_rot_alignment.py: E1 follow-up: why does the rotated-field coarse map show only 2 hot tiles (original: 11) although the rotated hot tiles have the same mean loss?scripts/e1_rot_check.py: E1 covariance check: the 11 hot 5x5 tiles of RRRRRLLLLLL (top-left (x,y)) become, in the field rotated 90 degrees clockwise ((x,y)->(-y,x)), the 5x5 tiles withscripts/e1_stats.py: E1: TSAW (examples/tsaw.rs; experiments/2026-10-13-e1-one-sided-hot-region/results/e1_tsaw.csv, tsaw 26 16384 < experiments/2026-10-13-e1-one-sided-hot-region/rscripts/e1c_stats.py: E1c: Rayleigh test on lobe bearings across the tethered ages of RRRRRLLLLLL. Rule: notes/frontier-2026-10-13-results.md.scripts/run_e1.sh: E1: knockout map at other ages and with the field rotated 90 degrees (RRRRRLLLLLL). usage (WSL): RAYON_NUM_THREADS=1 bash experiments/2026-10-13-e1-one-sided-hoscripts/run_e1c.sh
Results
11 entries in results/ (5 are .log/.done markers); csv/json/txt outputs, *_stats.txt hold the summaries quoted in the notes.
Bulk output (gitignored)
dumps_e1/knock_e1/
Notebook
No committed Jupyter notebook is available for this experiment yet.