Where do people actually connect — a room built for it, or a line built for nothing?
Conditions are published figures or derived from them. Output is measured from a standard run — 1,200 people, 4 hours, fixed seed, identical for both rooms. A highlighted cell is only marked where “more” is actually better; density and volume are conditions, not scores.
A nightclub is purpose-built for this. Lighting, sound, alcohol, staff, a licence, a door policy — an entire industry of infrastructure whose stated function is putting strangers within reach of each other. A queue is a failure state. Nobody designed it, nobody wants it, and its entire content is waiting.
The queue wins, and not narrowly. Both rooms produce comparable raw contact — 17.6 encounters per person per hour against 15.3 — but after four hours the queue has left a largest connected group of 634 people out of 1,200, against the nightclub's 213. Roughly three times the network, with no alcohol at all.
The mechanism is not mysterious. A club runs at 100 dB, which crushes the range at which speech works down to 75 centimetres; a queue is quiet, so speech carries the full 3.6 metres of Hall's social zone. And a club floor is churn — people move, dance, go to the bar — whereas in a queue the person beside you is still there in an hour. The club buys contact and destroys the conditions for it in the same purchase.
