Balance

About this test

Keeping a bar balanced on a pivot is an unstable control problem: the further the bar gets from level, the stronger the force pulling it down. There is therefore no resting position. Either you correct constantly, or the bar goes, and the time you have to react shrinks as it tips.

The difficulty is not speed but dosing. Everybody’s first mistake is pushing too hard: the bar levels, overshoots, and you have to start again the other way with more momentum. Two or three of those and it is over. Players who last give very short impulses and release before the bar is straight.

Two things degrade over time: the bar’s instability rises steadily, and random jolts arrive more often and harder. Your score therefore does not measure a position held but a correction sustained — and the moment you lose it says mostly how well you managed not to over-react.

How it works

The bar starts level and its tendency to fall rises by about eleven percent every ten seconds. A random jolt lands every second and a half at first, then up to twice a second, and its force grows too. The run ends when the tilt passes roughly forty degrees. Your score is the time held: three seconds scores zero out of a hundred, forty-five seconds scores one hundred.