Ants
A hundred million years of coordination with nobody in charge, and the four numbers it runs on. The same four this system runs on — a mark strengthens a path, a warn adds resistance, both evaporate on a clock nobody sets, and a walker takes the strongest net path it can reach.
4 stories are named here. They are free, and they are meant to be — the thing worth having is the notation, and a story that starts selling stops being able to hand it over.
The stories
0 told, 4 not yet. A story counts as told when its sources check out, and not before — the state is read from the index, never typed into this sentence.
- What the ground cannot holddrafted
Every mark an ant leaves is a report about the past; there is no chemical for intention, so a colony can be measured and never held to anything.
turns on Events · text/ants-at-work.md
- The milldrafted
A column that closes on its own path walks until it dies, past food, with nothing chasing it and not one ant doing anything wrong.
turns on Paths · text/the-mill.md
- The founding queenplanned
She seals herself in and metabolises her own flight muscles to feed the first brood — the one moment a colony is a single point of failure.
turns on Actors · text/story-production-plan.md
- The double bridgeplanned
A colony finds the shorter of two paths with no ant able to compare them, and the algorithm built from that has a known failure that is our open defect.
turns on Learning · text/story-production-plan.md
Turn the crank
A path that keeps being walked keeps being reinforced. Press lap and every ant on the ring deposits correctly, exactly as designed. Nothing goes wrong. Watch what happens anyway.
- strength
- 4.00
- resistance
- 0.00
- net
- 4.00
- since outside
- 0
Something from the world is still arriving. That is the whole difference, and it is not a property of the path — it is a property of what keeps touching it.
Where the metaphor stops
Ants have colonies; this system has Groups, and the two are not the same word
wearing different clothes — a Group is a tenancy boundary whose siblings are
isolated by tree shape, and a colony has no siblings and nothing to isolate. The
evaporation above is the ants'. Ours is a design that has not been proven at that
seam, and text/colony.md § 4 says so in
its own words rather than leaving it to be discovered.
Explore the colony
The reference — nine castes, the deposit types, the five chains, the genome — is
text/ants-reference.md. The TypeQL functions are
schema/ants.tql. The arithmetic is
@/lib/ants. The stories are free. The course is where
you use the notation on a system you own.