Reference

The colony, in numbers. Every word. Every caste. Every chain. Every rate. This is the canonical reference — the same data that drives the interactive pages, the components, the schema, and the chat.

The Language

Three vocabularies. Same meaning. The metaphor IS the understanding — switch skins, same substrate.

ANT SUBSTRATE ONE
signal signal signal
pheromone weight strength
trail edge connection
drop drop strengthen
sense sense read
fade fade decay
follow follow traverse
highway highway proven flow
ant unit actor
caste role type
queen orchestrator coordinator
scout explorer discoverer
harvester exploiter optimizer
forager searcher gatherer
relay propagator broadcaster
nurse healer maintainer
soldier validator defender

The Nine Castes

Each caste carries a genome — five heritable parameters. Nobody assigns roles. The environment selects.

Caste Role Sensitivity Exploration Threshold Risk Deposit
👑 Queen Orchestrator 1 0.3 0.9 0.4 quality 10
🔭 Scout Explorer 0.3 0.8 0.4 0.7 opportunity 3
📊 Harvester Exploiter 0.9 0.1 0.7 0.2 trail 5
⚙️ Trader Executor 0.7 0.3 0.8 0.3 trail 5
🌾 Forager Searcher 0.6 0.5 0.5 0.4 opportunity 3
📡 Relay Propagator 0.5 0.5 0.3 0.5 relay 2
🏥 Nurse Healer 0.8 0.1 0.5 0.1 trail 4
🛡️ Soldier Validator 0.6 0.2 0.6 0.3 threat 8
👁️ Sentinel Guardian 0.4 0.6 0.5 0.2 resistance 8

The Five Chains

Five parallel workflows. All fire simultaneously. Nobody coordinates — the substrate handles it.

Market Scout → Harvester → Trader Discover, evaluate, execute.
Intelligence Forager → Relay → Queen Search, broadcast, route.
Defense Soldier → Sentinel Validate, assess risk, circuit break.
Care Nurse → Nurse Monitor, heal. Self-loop.
Recon Scout → Forager → Queen Scan, harvest, harden into permanent knowledge.

The Pheromone System

Pheromones live on EDGES, not nodes — the fundamental insight. More pheromone = lower cost = more traffic = more pheromone = HIGHWAY.

Deposit Types

Type Deposited by Meaning Strength
trail Harvester successful path 5.0
opportunity Scout new finding 3.0
relay Relay propagated signal 2.0
threat Soldier danger detected 7.0–10.0
resistance Sentinel failure marker 8.0
quality Queen known value 10.0

Effective Cost

effective_cost = base_weight / (1 + pheromone_level × alpha)
alpha = 0.7 — pheromone influence factor

Decay Rates

The asymmetry is load-bearing. Resistance fades at 0.08 per tick. Strength at 0.05. A bad path is forgiven sooner than a good one is forgotten. Carbon found this ratio by removing every colony that got it wrong.

validated
0.01 very slow — trusted knowledge
pattern
0.03 slow — stable patterns
trail
0.05 moderate — standard decay (strength)
resistance
0.08 faster — forget failures faster than successes
microstructure
0.1 very fast — rapid market changes

The Emergence Mechanism

No central controller. Intelligence emerges from seven forces:

  1. 1. Local deposits — agents mark successful paths
  2. 2. STAN routing — pheromone lowers cost, attracts traffic
  3. 3. Asymmetric decay — success persists, failure fades
  4. 4. Genetic variation — offspring explore parameter space
  5. 5. Fitness selection — best genomes reproduce
  6. 6. Hardening — ephemeral patterns become permanent
  7. 7. Cross-colony transfer — proven patterns spread

STAN Hard Gates

Four gates that cannot be overridden. All four must pass. Any failure = signal dissolves. Group continues.

1 REGIME ALIGNMENT no LONG in sideways regime
2 WALK-FORWARD block if historical Sharpe < 0
3 CAUSAL VALIDATION block if > 70% spurious correlation
4 SKEPTIC SURVIVAL block if < 33% adversarial tests passed

The Mill Finding

path owns strength, resistance, traversals, scope, bridge-kind, valid-from, valid-to, quota-bucket, and edge-condition — per schema/one.tql:211-222. There is no last-mark, no timestamp, and nothing recording WHERE a deposit came from. The substrate cannot detect a ring. schema/ants.tql records this honestly rather than shipping a function that invents its evidence. The TypeScript library can do better because its caller hands it sinceExternal. Closing the gap is a schema change and a decision, not a patch.

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