The queen lays eggs and is fed. She issues nothing.
The scouts ignore existing trails. They seek the lowest pheromone, not the highest. Their mortality is high. The colony would starve without them.
The harvesters follow the strongest trails. They build the superhighways.
The soldiers validate. The nurses heal. The relay connects discoveries to infrastructure. The forager searches broadly and brings back everything.
Nine roles. Each carries a genome: pheromone sensitivity, exploration bias, deposit threshold, risk tolerance. Each deposits a different signal type at a different strength. Nobody assigns them. Nobody promotes them. The genome is inherited and the environment selects.
This ran for a hundred million years. It is the most battle-tested organisational design in the history of life on Earth.
The nine castes
Queen — Orchestrator
Sensitivity 1.0. She reads everything. Deposits quality (10.0) — but only what matters. Routes tasks. Hardens patterns. Makes final decisions. The one ant whose death ends the colony — but for most of its life, she is not directing anything.
Scout — Explorer
Sensitivity 0.3. She ignores existing trails. Lower pheromone = more attractive. Deposits opportunity (3.0), weak but frequent. High mortality. Essential for discovery. Without scouts, the colony never finds new food, new nest sites, new routes. The scout is the reason the colony doesn’t starve on a patch it exhausted three seasons ago.
Harvester — Exploiter
Sensitivity 0.9. She follows the strongest trail. Deposits trail (5.0) on major success. Builds superhighways. The harvester turns scouting into infrastructure. She is not here to discover. She is here to deepen what the scouts found.
Trader — Executor
Computation power: high. Search depth: deep. She does the heavy work. Complex problem solving. Execution. The trader takes what the harvesters found and the queen routed and turns it into outcome.
Forager — Searcher
Sensitivity 0.6. Broad search. Large path memory. High load capacity. She covers ground and brings back everything — not judging quality, gathering volume. The queen and harvesters sort it later.
Relay — Propagator
Sensitivity 0.5. Targets medium-pheromone edges. Amplifies weak signals from scouts. Connects discoveries to superhighways. Prevents isolated clusters. Deposits moderate (2.0) at low cost (0.3). Without the relay, the scouts’ discoveries never reach the harvesters’ highways.
Nurse — Healer
High detection sensitivity. Low risk tolerance. Monitors colony health. Heals unhealthy agents. Self-loop care chain. The nurse notices when something is wrong before it spreads.
Soldier — Validator
High verification accuracy. High defense strength. Validates signals before execution. Rejects false positives. Deposits threat (up to 10.0) when danger is real. The soldier is the gate: nothing false gets past.
Sentinel — Guardian
Watches the perimeter. Circuit breaker. Risk management. The sentinel detects what is happening OUTSIDE the colony — a quantity no ant inside can sense, and the one that makes all the difference between a healthy trail and a mill.
The five chains
These nine castes don’t work in sequence. They run five parallel chains simultaneously:
- Market (blue): Scout → Harvester → Trader. Discovery → evaluation → execution.
- Intelligence (purple): Forager → Relay → Queen. Search → broadcast → orchestration.
- Defense (red): Soldier → Sentinel. Validate → risk assess → circuit break.
- Care (green): Nurse → Nurse. Monitor → heal. Self-loop.
- Recon (amber): Scout → Forager → Queen. Scan → harvest → harden into permanent knowledge.
All five fire simultaneously. Nobody coordinates them. The substrate handles it.
In ONE
Every agent in ONE carries a genome. The nine castes are the roles. The five chains are the workflows. The substrate — schema/ants.tql — contains the arithmetic as TypeQL functions. ant_net(), ant_toxic(), ant_follow(), ant_worn(), ant_unwalked(), ant_fade_rate(). Zero new types. Zero new dimensions. The six dimensions of schema/one.tql are untouched.
The colony is already here.
See all nine castes with interactive genome bars at one.ie/ants/castes.