Subject collections (268 articles) applied mathematics (74 articles) differential equations Articles on similar topics can be found in the following collections The idealized mathematical problem of four bugs in cyclic pursuit starting from a 2-by-1 rectangle is considered, and asymptotic formulas are derived to describe the motion. In contrast to the famous case of four bugs on a square, here the trajectories quickly freeze to essentially one dimension. After the first rotation about the centre point, the scale of the configuration has shrunk by a factor of 10 427907250 , and this number is then exponentiated four more times with each successive cycle. Relations to Knuth's double-arrow notation and level-index arithmetic are discussed.