There's an art of knowing when
Never try to guess
Cook until it's soft and then
Ninety seconds lessIt’s different, from, say, a rice cooker, where all rice more or less gets cooked the same way with varying times, you can definitely screw up cooking rice in a pot, and you don’t, say, need to reserve rice water for anything. Also rice cookers keep rice warm for hours on end in a manner that doesn’t detract from the taste or dry it out, but I don’t know that that would work for pasta.
You say this but we're deep in a thread with terms like 'saucibility'. Surely if pasta science can address a problem that's also neatly solved by simply adding more sauce, it can spare a few mighty braincells on 'standing by a pot for two minutes frantically fishing out and tasting hot undercooked noodles'. Maybe every packet of pasta can come with a couple of noodles on teabag strings.
Of course is not a science, sometimes it's not gonna be perfect, but on average it is
consumer models also exist, but are quite expensive.
My girlfriend bought a Cookeo[2] (it's an electric multi-cooker for different kinds of food, including pasta) and after a few failed attempts we have been happy of the results. It's quite cheap.
p.s. tasting pasta while cooking it at home is kind of a ritual here in Italy
[1] http://ifea.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Italgi-pasta-c...
As a lazy person, I continue to be disappointed pasta scientists and designers have done little to make that part easier and less work.