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by throwaway_yy2Di 4305 days ago
In a sense it really has four "states", since the ant remembers which direction it had previously moved. That's implicit in the clockwise/counterclockwise rule.
2 comments

I would say there are 10 states. Any square can be empty or have an ant, and if the ant is there its direction is known. That gives 5 states of ant presence and direction, and since a square has 2 color states, that's 10 total states.
I'm counting "states" as the term's used in (tape) Turing machines, where you distinguish the internal states of the finite automaton (tape head) from the memory states of the unbounded tape (symbols or colors). So this ant would be analogous to a 4-state, 2-color Turing machine. The ant has four possible states; each cell of the grid has two.
What about when the ant reaches the edge of his grid? (this part I couldn't find an explanation for on the wiki)
The grid has no edges, it's infinite in all directions!
I see. It would be interesting to see this on a finite universe - a curved universe where opposite edges join
Oh yeah, that's a good point!