RETRIEVAL HEAD

Reaches far back into long context and copies the specific span an answer needs. Sparse — few of them — but ablate them and long-range factual recall collapses. Constructed needle-in-a-haystack to isolate the mechanism.
AMBER
2D · Quantitative Channel
CANVAS 2D
demo: sine — replace in draw2D()
CANVAS 2D UNAVAILABLE
3D · Spatial Channel
SOFT-GL · NO GPU · NO LIB
DRAG ROTATE · WHEEL ZOOM
demo: lattice + orbit — replace in build3D()/draw3D()
RENDER FAILED —
Notes

Retrieval head. Distinct from induction: rather than keying on local repetition to predict the next token, a retrieval head copies a semantically required span from far away to answer a query — defined by attention onto a known target, not by next-token completion. They are sparse and universal across models, and causally tied to factuality: knock them out and needle-in-a-haystack recall fails. Amber tier: the copy-from-distance mechanism is exact; the haystack is constructed.