Field notes / Experiment guide
Are rare colours concentrated in the weak spots?
The knockout maps identify sensitive patches. Do unusual colour classes help explain why those particular patches matter?
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
The idea under test
If rare colours carry disproportionate tether information, sensitive tiles should be enriched for them and targeted corruption should matter more.
What we learned
The hard-rule maps support a rare-colour association and motivate class-targeted interventions. Generalization beyond those maps requires separate tests.
What this leaves open
Rare colour, position and visit frequency covary. Enrichment is not sufficient to identify the return mechanism.
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
hot-tiles
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: hot, rare
Scripts
scripts/hot_lists.py: Item 10 complement: cell lists inside the knockout agent's hot 5x5 tiles (read-only use of experiments/2026-10-12-knockout-maps/knock/RULE/hot.csv, experiments/scripts/hot_rare.py: Cross-check for items 9/10/14 (read-only on experiments/2026-10-12-knockout-maps/knock/ and experiments/2026-10-12-knockout-maps/dumps/): are the knockout map'sscripts/hot_recolour_stats.py: Item 10 complement: recolouring only the rare-colour cells inside the knockout hot tiles vs the same number of other cells in the same tiles.scripts/rare_class_test.py: Open question Q4 / item 14 generalisation: are the rarest colours of other rules also critical?
Results
7 entries in results/ (0 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.