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Field notes / Experiment guide

Where does the ant actually spend its time?

A picture of visited cells hides how unevenly the ant uses them. What do occupancy maps reveal about compact growers and tethered rules?

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 tethered rule RRRRRLLLLLL.
The territory is larger than the neighbourhood where this ant spends most of its time. Compare the colour field with occupancy and the page’s motion diagnostics. This is a selected saved example; the individual panel labels give its measurement context. Figure source and recipe ↗
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

If a field guides repeated returns, visit-density and drift maps should distinguish that behaviour from simply filling the territory.

What we learned

The saved pages place colour, occupancy and motion summaries side by side for selected rules, making the home-versus-territory distinction visible.

What this leaves open

Accumulated visits mix many ages of the growing territory. A bright centre is not direct evidence of an instantaneous inward force.

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

occupancy-pages

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: colours, drift, page, render

Scripts

  • scripts/page_images.py: Theme-safe occupancy portraits for the page: unvisited transparent, visited
  • scripts/render.py

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.

2026-10-13-occupancy-pages · 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.