How far apart the two windows are, against how long they are

How far apart the two windows are, against how long they are

At every point the two windows are set to agree on an even stream: D is W times the mean gap of 10 ticks. The vertical axis is the share of the counts on which they disagree, sampled at 16 instants. The evenly spaced stream is flat at zero at every length, which is the control and is the only case in which the two models are the same object. The bursty stream disagrees by 52% at W = 16 and by nothing at all from W = 64 upward, because the burst is 64 arrivals long and a window that holds whole bursts cannot tell which model produced it. The drifting stream never converges over this range: its rate changes on a timescale longer than any window drawn here.

Drawn at 700 × 372, wide on the page. Everything above is what two-windows returns with no arguments; the caption is the generator's own, computed from the numbers in the drawing rather than written beside it.

5 essays call two-windows. The drawing above is what it returns with no arguments at all; every call below passes it something, because a placement that passes nothing draws whichever member of the family the generator happens to default to rather than the one its essay argues about — which is what optcheck and figfill exist to catch.