Each game is a real system, one thing to tune, and a cost to bring down. Lower is better. A reference tells you what your number means. The world changes every midnight.
Each one adds an idea to the one before. Play them in order or don't. Every game has the same anatomy: what you tune, what the world hides from you, and what the cost is.
Four numbers hold a pole upright while gusts grow and a battery drains. Riccati sets par; the world has a delay Riccati never heard of.
Drag the closed-loop poles where you want them. Then run the experiment on a servo whose actuator was left out of the model.
Every linear system responds as a sum of modes, each shaped like est. The numbers s are called the poles, and they live on a plane: the real part says whether a mode grows or dies, the imaginary part says how fast it wobbles.
Left of the axis, modes decay. On the axis, they ring forever. To the right, they grow until something breaks. So the left half-plane is where stable things live, and feedback is the art of moving poles into it, cheaply, and keeping them there when the world turns out to be different from the model.
Every game here is that art with one idea removed from its wrapping. The first game moves four poles at once with four numbers. The third lets you put them anywhere and then shows you where they really went.
The score is the cost a control engineer would write on a whiteboard, in the units the system lives in: seconds, joules, an integral of error. The game never says correct. It says 8.65.
Every game runs the textbook answer in the same world you play in, and something naive next to it. Your number sits between them, or below both. That is all a score needs to mean something.
Gusts, lags, friction and noise are drawn from the date. You get the same world all day and a new one tomorrow, so there is nothing to memorise, only to understand.
Every plant has something its manual leaves out. The textbook answer for the model is not the best answer for the world, which is the honest state of the field. Runs are kept in your browser only.
Riccati sets par. People beat par.