  In the gathering problem, n autonomous robots have to meet on a single point.
We consider the gathering of a closed chain of point-shaped, anonymous robots
on a grid. The robots only have local knowledge about a constant number of
neighboring robots along the chain in both directions. Actions are performed in
the fully synchronous time model FSYNC. Every robot has a limited memory that
may contain one timestamp of the global clock, also visible to its direct
neighbors. In this synchronous time model, there is no limited view gathering
algorithm known to perform better than in quadratic runtime. The configurations
that show the quadratic lower bound are closed chains. In this paper, we
present the first sub-quadratic---in fact linear time---gathering algorithm for
closed chains on a grid.
