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Field notes / Experiment guide

How random is the ant inside its own territory?

A deterministic ant often looks like a random walker in the interior. Do its colours, turns and short-lag motion support that picture?

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

Saved multi-panel colour and occupancy analysis of compact-growing rule RLR.
A compact grower provides a comparison with the tethered example. The visit-density and motion panels ask how the walker uses its territory, which a colour snapshot alone cannot reveal. This is descriptive context, not an independent test of every linked experiment. Figure source and recipe ↗

The idea under test

Repeated visits may mix local colour states enough to produce approximately diffusive short-time motion.

What we learned

The mixing diagnostics test local colour, turn and displacement statistics rather than inferring randomness from a picture.

What this leaves open

Short-lag diffusion and colour balance do not establish uniform spatial occupation or explain access to the moving boundary.

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

mixing

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: mix, mixing

Scripts

  • scripts/mixing_calib.py: Item 2 calibration: run mixing.py's MSD-slope estimator on a walker whose answer is
  • scripts/mixing_stats.py: Summarise the mixing test (experiments/2026-10-13-mixing/results/mixing.csv) for the page.

Results

6 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.

2026-10-13-mixing · Source revision ba38590b33e3

Original source ↗ · Input hashes

Introductions summarize the evidence; the expandable record preserves the original predictions, methods and caveats. Figures and notebooks are published as saved. Publication runs no simulations or notebook cells.