The First Day at Work
Mistakes: 0
Objectives 0/7
💻 Computer
🧹 Breaks
🍱 Food
Settings, statistics and science
Live graph (energy, focus, stress)
Experiment: which break habit gets the most work done?
Replays the same 8:30 - 18:00 day with the same random seed under three policies and reports tasks finished, mistakes and mean focus.
The science
Energy budget. Resting energy requirement of a cat follows Kleiber scaling, RER = 70 · M0.75 kcal/day (M in kg). A 5 kg cat needs about kcal/day. Activity multiplies it (nap 0.9, work 1.25, meeting 1.3, play 2.5). Hunger = 1 - E/100 where E is a 100 kcal stomach-plus-glycogen buffer, a deliberate simplification.
Focus. Sustained attention decays while working and recovers during breaks (vigilance-decrement idea). The rates are tuned game values, not measured cat data.
Stress and performance. Quality follows a Yerkes-Dodson inverted U: P = exp(-(S - 0.35)2 / (2 · 0.282)). Too little or too much arousal lowers output.
Mistakes are a Poisson process with rate 0.02 · (1 - F · P) per minute of work.
Honest limits. Real cats do not hold jobs; behaviour constants are illustrative. Only the Kleiber term is empirical.