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Field notes / Experiment guide

Which rules keep an ant close to home?

Is tethering an isolated curiosity, or a recurring kind of behaviour among very slow-growing 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 ↗

The idea under test

Screening restarts on saved fields should identify repeatable confinement and possible families of home behaviour.

What we learned

The tether screen finds a broader collection for the later home-type and intervention studies, rather than relying on a single striking rule.

What this leaves open

Restart position, heading and field age matter. A field that confines one restart may not confine another.

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

tether-rules

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: dumps, tether

Scripts

  • scripts/tether_screen_stats.py: Item 15: how many tethered (log-class) rules are 'hard' (home lost on a shuffled field)?

Results

4 entries in results/ (0 are .log/.done markers); csv/json/txt outputs, *_stats.txt hold the summaries quoted in the notes.

Bulk output (gitignored)

  • dumps_f/

Notebook

No committed Jupyter notebook is available for this experiment yet.

2026-10-13-tether-rules · 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.