From Boundary Crossings to Global Connectivity: A Minimal Mechanism in Structured Agent-Based Landscapes

Abstract

This study investigates a minimal mechanism through which local mobility heterogeneity produces global reconfiguration in structured agent-based systems. Agents move in a multi-attractor landscape, where a small fraction exhibits higher-mobility exploratory dynamics while the remainder remain locally constrained. By comparing random-walk exploration, interface-sensitive dynamics, novelty-biased exploration, and a flat-landscape control, I identify the conditions under which large-scale connectivity emerges. As the fraction of exploratory agents increases, the system transitions from a fragmented regime to an increasingly connected transition network. Event-level analysis shows that configurational switching is strongly localized near inter-attractor boundaries, indicating that interfaces act as critical gateways through which transitions occur. These localized events accumulate over time, progressively integrating the landscape. Importantly, the core effect persists under minimal random-walk exploration, demonstrating that neither optimization nor goal-directed behavior is required. By contrast, when landscape structure is removed, connectivity becomes operationally trivial and the boundary-mediated mechanism disappears. The results show that large-scale reconfiguration emerges from the interaction between mobility heterogeneity and spatial constraints. More broadly, they suggest a minimal generative principle for global connectivity in agent-based systems, highlighting the role of boundaries as mediators of emergent connectivity.