There is a number that, if inverted, would have deleted the ants from the fossil record a hundred million years ago.
Resistance fades at 8% per tick. Strength at 5%.
A bad path is forgiven sooner than a good one is forgotten.
This is not a design choice. It is not an optimisation. It is what was left after everything else died. Every colony whose forgetting was tuned wrong — that remembered failure too long, that let success evaporate too fast — walked into a desert it couldn’t escape and is not around to be studied.
The asymmetry is the load-bearing constant of the whole architecture.
What happens if you invert it
Imagine a system where strength fades faster than resistance. Every success is forgotten quickly. Every failure is remembered forever. Walkers avoid paths that failed once, even if they’ve succeeded a hundred times since. The system re-explores every success and avoids every risk.
It starves.
This is not a metaphor. It is what happens to recommendation engines that over-weight negative signals. To credit scores that never forgive. To performance reviews that remember one mistake. To organisations where the cost of being wrong once is eternal.
The colony does the opposite. It tries things. Most fail. The failure fades. What works gets reinforced. The net effect is exploration without paralysis.
In ONE
The numbers are in the substrate. STRENGTH_FADE = 0.05. RESISTANCE_FADE = 0.08. The test at one.ie/web/tests/ants.test.ts refuses any commit that inverts them. The line RESISTANCE_FADE).toBeGreaterThan(STRENGTH_FADE is a gate. It will never pass in the other direction.
The real rates live on the Group, not hardcoded. schema/one.tql puts fade-rate on the group entity, so a tenant can tune it. The defaults are the ants’ defaults — the shape, not a measurement — and they carry a hundred million years of field testing.
What this means for your system
Every system that learns from feedback has a forgetting rate. Every system that routes work based on past performance has a memory decay. If you haven’t tuned yours deliberately, you inherited someone else’s default. Chances are it’s symmetric — 5% here, 5% there — and symmetric forgetting is a design that was removed from the world along with the animals carrying it.
Tune the asymmetry. Forgive failure faster than you forget success. The ants paid for this lesson with every colony that got it wrong.
You get it for free.
Turn the crank at one.ie/ants and watch the asymmetry in action.