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

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.