Discuss Findings

across all 574 numeric sanitized payloads, the small-system effect is already large: at L=16 the zealot threshold k=20 gives slowdown ratio 1.22841 [1.21618, 1.24065] and normalized consensus time 47.99093 [47.72616, 48.25569] versus 39.45273 [39.12321, 39.78226] at k=0, while consensus completion drops from 0.51981 [0.50660, 0.53302] to 0.05548 [0.04859, 0.06236]; by L=24, k=20 almost saturates the time cap with normalized time 49.99430 [49.98361, 50.00498] and completion 0.00024 [-0.00009, 0.00058], and the across-size maximum slowdown summary for k=20 is 1.17070 [1.16752, 1.17387].

CONFIRMED Persistent local zealotry strongly slows coarsening and, at the largest thresholds, effectively removes consensus from the simulation window. The mechanism is a persistent pinning field: zealots keep re-seeding local disagreement after ordinary voter domains would otherwise merge. That converts ordinary curvature-driven coarsening into a much slower defect-annihilation problem with frequent trapping. The effect is already visible on the smallest lattice and becomes qualitatively stronger once larger systems start hitting the common time cap.