Abstract
A companion study shows that decentralized coordination collapses as communication delay approaches the coordination timescale, and that the collapse is primitive-independent. Here we ask the natural follow-up: if an agent cannot receive fresh peer state, can it anticipate it? We add a decide-on-prediction hook — each agent extrapolates its delayed view of peers forward by the delay horizon and coordinates on the predicted "now," while the ground-truth state reconciles when the delayed information actually arrives. We evaluate three cheap, deterministic predictors — constant-velocity, a per-agent Kalman filter, and a windowed linear fit — against a no-prediction baseline across a delay sweep on the same rendezvous and consensus tasks. Prediction recovers a large fraction of the delay-lost quality: on consensus at delay $40$, where no-prediction sits at $Q = 0.00$, constant-velocity holds $Q = 0.66$. The ranking is consistent across delays and tasks — constant-velocity $\gtrsim$ linear $>$ Kalman $>$ none — and the recovery is largest precisely where the un-anticipated swarm has collapsed, i.e. anticipation shifts the collapse boundary outward. We frame the result honestly: the baseline predictors are the result; a learned graph predictor is a stretch direction, not the gate. All numbers regenerate from a committed set of experiment records ($200$ cells, $5$ seeds each; $0$ NaN).