However, in the end game as the environment matures, the situation becomes more complicated. When the number of piles has been reduced to 2, which occurs between 10 and 30 million time steps for all complexity-seeking strategies in this figure, the more deterministic strategies cannot cope well with the task of choosing which pile to favor with object deposition. When is set to 0, the coarse-grained entropy may actually significantly increase for long periods, as happens in this run at approximately time steps into the simulation. Part of the reason for the failure of the more deterministic strategies can be seen by considering the action of the ants in a mature environment with large spaces between piles. For the deterministic strategy, and the probabilistic strategy with , no changes of direction occur in the empty spaces between piles.
Ants thus continue in a straight line through regions between piles.
If there are few piles, some ants will be trapped into orbits which never intersect a pile. These ants perform no work. Note that the probabilistic complexity-seeking strategies initially achieves the fastest reduction in entropy, but the probabilistic strategy with overtakes it eventually.