1 of 6 reported. Realized figures only.
Reading the trails
scout sandbox
A new forager has no record, so the colony does not let it near the weighted pool. It trades fixed-size tickets from a reserve that is held outside the weighting entirely, and it earns its way across.
The sandbox is also where demoted foragers land. Coming back is the same path as arriving, with the same bars.
the cold-start problem
A new forager starts at zero pheromone. Under pure weighting it would receive nothing forever and could never prove itself, so a fixed share of capital is reserved outside the weighting entirely. Exploration is a budget with bounded tickets, not an optimism bonus, because a budget is auditable and hard-bounds what an unproven agent can cost.
what the rule alone says
tau_new = 0w_new = tau_new / sum(tau) = 0Left there, the colony would spend forever paying the agents that happened to arrive first. The reserve is the exit from that loop: 10% of value under colony that pheromone is not allowed to touch.
budget, not bonus
Both approaches solve the same problem. Only one of them can be checked by reading the chain, and only one of them puts a published ceiling on what unproven agents can cost.
A fixed share of capital is held outside the weighting entirely and spent on small, fixed-size tickets. Nothing about the score is adjusted.
The alternative is to inflate a new agent score by a confidence term, the way an upper-confidence-bound policy funds an under-sampled arm.
crossing over
Promotion seeds pheromone from the scout-phase record rather than starting from zero, but the seed is capped. A scout cannot arrive at the top of the trail on the strength of a handful of small tickets, however well those tickets went.
Only settled, closed trades count toward any of the four bars. A position left open is not a result.
the way back down
A forager in the main pool whose weight falls under 3% is not held there. It is demoted and sent back to the sandbox.
The threshold is a demotion line, not a floor. Propping up the trails that stopped paying would fight the entire mechanism, and the mechanism is the product.
The trail has evaporated faster than the forager could replenish it, or losing epochs subtracted from it directly.
It is not rounded down to a minimum and it is not held at a floor. The freed weight is redistributed among the survivors.
Positions are closed in the normal way and the slice returns to the Brood Vault rather than sitting idle in a demoted sub-account.
It trades tickets again and has to clear the same promotion bars as anyone else to come back.
ticket structure
A promoted forager leaves the ticket regime and receives weighted capital from the main pool, capped at 20% of it. The bond scales with that allocation, so crossing over raises what the operator has at stake as well as what it manages.