Field notes / Experiment guide
Reading the layers of an ant’s colour field
What does the spatial arrangement of colours reveal that an overall histogram misses?
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 colour layers can expose structure written by repeated visits, while separating young boundary cells from the older interior.
What we learned
The saved layer and colour records support inspection of the pattern field and related edge investigations.
What this leaves open
These records are descriptive material. A visible pattern needs an explicit statistic and a control before it can count as a tested 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
layers-colours
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: layers
Scripts
scripts/layers_census_c.py: EXPLORATORY: how common is the 'crust' class? Proxy: census edge-entry probability c (probe_summary.csv), since allscripts/layers_classes.py: EXPLORATORY (added after seeing Arm A): do the 24 ants (12 extreme + 12 typical kappa) split into a 'crust' classscripts/layers_select.py: Arm A selection (notes/kappa-experiment-design.md): six lowest and six highest rule-mean kappa among rules with >= 6scripts/layers_stats.py: Arm A statistics. Input experiments/2026-10-13-layers-colours/results/layers.csv (examples/layers.rs 26 8192 < experiments/2026-10-13-layers-colours/results/layscripts/layers_stats_typical.py: Arm A statistics. Input experiments/2026-10-13-layers-colours/results/layers_typical.csv (examples/layers.rs 26 8192 < experiments/2026-10-13-layers-colours/res
Results
9 entries in results/ (1 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.