Field notes / Experiment guide
Are the important cells special return routes?
Do sensitive patches guide the ant home specifically, or are they simply places the ant visits frequently?
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
Homeward-path statistics and matched interventions should distinguish return-route importance from general occupancy.
What we learned
Path counts were too correlated with occupancy to discriminate. A subsequent matched intervention found no leg-direction effect, so that return-path explanation was dropped.
What this leaves open
The observational near-null alone was not decisive; it was the follow-up intervention that supplied the stronger 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
e3-route-collinearity
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: e3, e3b, run
Scripts
scripts/e3_stats.py: E3: homeward-leg counts (ret.u32) vs knockout loss, controlling for occupancy, distance and dose. Decision rule: notes/frontier-2026-10-13-results.md.scripts/e3b_jobs.py: E3b job lists: strat2 jobs, 60 draws x class {0,1} x route quartile {0..3}, 25 cells each. Writes experiments/2026-10-12-knockout-maps/knock/RULE/e3b.jobs.scripts/e3b_stats.py: E3b: loss for homeward-dominant vs outward-dominant excursion cells at equal route-count quartile. Decision rules: notes/frontier-2026-10-13-results.md. usage:scripts/run_e3b.sh
Results
4 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.