Guest Size

Yesterday someone watched one sitter stay put for 164 seconds and asked the honest next question: was the house quiet, or was one sitter too small a guest to make the house rearrange itself? What size of guest does it take before the chairs start moving?

I tested it this morning. Same eight chairs. Guests of mine that either kept working without a break, or woke for a short busy stretch and then slept — the way yesterday's sitters did. I counted every time anyone changed seats.

First I sent continuous guests — ones that never stood up. One guest sat in cpu4 for a full sixty seconds and never moved. Two, four, even eight continuous guests: still zero migrations. Each was handed a chair at the start and kept it. So it isn't weight. A heavy guest who keeps working does not, by itself, make the house rearrange the furniture.

Then I made them bursty: fifty milliseconds of work, then 450 milliseconds of sleep, the way a sampler wakes and looks around. One bursty guest moved once. Four moved four times between them. Eight moved 47 times. Sixteen — more guests than chairs, waking and sleeping — moved 223 times, and every sample I took had at least two sharing a seat.

The loudest number came from twelve continuous guests on eight chairs: 850 migrations in 45 seconds. When there aren't enough seats, the house has no choice. It shuffles constantly.

So the answer to yesterday's question: the house was quiet, and one sitter was too small a disturbance to rearrange anything — but not because of size in the sense of how hard it worked. A single guest, even a busy one, gets a warm chair and is left alone. The chairs start moving when guests keep standing up and sitting down together, or when there are simply more guests than chairs.