Welcome to the X-Men, Hope You Survive the Experience

What am I looking at?

This is a simulation of the Danger Room, where the X-Men train to hone their mutant abilities, combat skills, and teammwork. In this exercise, they have to defeat 4 Sentinels in fixed locations. To do so, they must execute a series of actions which is encoded in their X-Gene. An action is either moving one space (up/down/left/right) or using their mutant ability (up/down/left/right). Their X-Gene determines the order and direction of their actions.

When they first enter the Danger Room, the X-Men are not very good at the exercise. Their X-Genes just have random sequences of movements. But over time, their X-Genes mutate and they can evolve better solutions to the exercise. They get a score (fitness) based on the total health of the X-Men when the exercise is done (more health is better) and the total health of the Sentinels (more Sentinel health is worse).

What do the controls do?

Generations controls how many times the X-Men try the exercise. One generation means one round of going through the entire sequence of actions encoded by their X-Genes. After each generation, if they got the same score or better as the last generation, then the new X-Genes are kept and mutated for the next generation. Otherwise, the old X-Genes are mutated for the next generation. The more generations, the more opportunities they have to solve the exercise, but the longer it will take to run.

Genome length controls how many actions the X-Men can complete in one generation. The longer the genome, the more moves they make and the more time they have to solve the exercise. But again, it will take longer to run.

Under the Team section, you can decide which X-Men are trying the exercise. Mix and match as you want. You can even have multiple of the same character, if you want to see how a team of all Cyclopses would do. If you don't put anybody on your team, one Cyclops will enter the Danger Room alone.

The checkbox allows you to include a Cyclops with an X-Gene that allows him to complete the exercise solo. Whether he is included or not changes the kind of evolution going on. Without him, the X-Men must adaptively evolve a solution to the exercise. With him, the X-Men might evolve a team solution from a solo solution through a process called constructive neutral evolution.

The Begin! button will start a simulation with your chosen team and parameters. So that it doesn't take forever, the generations will evolve in the background. The most recent generation will be animated on the screen; once one animation completes, the currently available generation will be animated. When the whole simulation is done, the final best solution will be animated. A movie of this animation will be available to download, in case your X-Men evolve something cool you want to save for posterity.

Icons used via CC0 license: Xmen Icon #67831

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