Mini-game
Dino egg incubator
Many processes require a prescribed surface temperature: curing composites, activating shoe-sole adhesives, drying coatings or forming plastic sheets. Heat diffuses through the material and dissipates to the air, so a moving source must adjust its position and power. Regulate both manually, or use Show solution to run ergodic heat coverage control (EHCC) without a material thermal model.
Average temperature alone does not ensure uniform heating. The error-bar bracket shows the spatial error spread, which increases when shell regions have different temperatures. Keep both average error and error spread inside the band for 30 seconds in Easy or 40 seconds in Hard.
Dino egg incubator
Move the pointer over the egg to aim the source and press to heat. Drag the Power slider to the right, or scroll up over the egg, for more power. Keyboard: arrow keys aim, Space heats, W increases power, S decreases it, and P pauses.
- Signed bandBoth the average error and its spread must stay between −2 °C and +2 °C. Leaving the band resets the count.
- Cold frontIn Hard mode, the outside temperature drops for a few seconds and the egg loses heat faster.
- SnowflakeA ring marks where it will land; on impact it cools that part of the shell.
Temperature-dependent sex determination: in crocodilians and many turtles, the incubation temperature sets the sex of the hatchling. In the American alligator, cooler nests produce females and warmer nests males; in many turtles the relation is reversed. Whether non-avian dinosaurs had this mechanism is not known (birds, the living dinosaurs, have chromosomal sex determination). In this game, 25 °C hatches a female and 30 °C a male.
The temperature field follows the EHCC heat equation, ∂T/∂t = α∇²T + λ(q_in − h(T − T_amb)), on the egg with insulated edges. Higher power concentrates more heat in a smaller area; lower power distributes less heat over a wider area. The source cannot cool the egg: only diffusion and heat loss to the air reduce its temperature.
Related work
- “Ergodic Heat Coverage Control: Model-Free Robotic Regulation of Temperature Distributions,” interactive companion with simulations and code. ignaciocuiral.com/Ergodic_Heat_Coverage_Control