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 Sentinels in fixed locations. To do so, each one 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?

Under the Team section, you can decide which X-Men are trying the exercise. Mix and match as you want. If you don't put anybody on your team, one Cyclops will enter the Danger Room alone.

The Train! button will start a simulation with your chosen team and Sentinels. 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.

X-Men, the Danger Room and X-Men character names are trademarks of Marvel. Icons used via CC0 license