Emergent Ordinal Geometry in Transformers Trained on Local Comparisons

ArXi:2606.01269v1 Announce Type: new Transitive inference is the challenge of inferring that A < C from knowing only adjacent relations (A < B, B < C). It is solved by humans and animals not through logical chaining but via an analogue mental number line, whose signature is the symbolic distance effect: distant comparisons are easier than nearby ones. We ask whether Transformers acquire the same primitive