Don’t know if this is what you had in mind, but this is what I’ve got for you.
http://www.faithacrossthemultiverse.com/DangerRoom.html
What are you looking at? I’ve simulated the X-Men Danger Room, where the X-Men train to learn how to work together as a team. They have to defeat all the Sentinels (robots firing blue lasers) using a sequence of actions encoded in an X-Gene. They practice over and over, making random changes to their X-Gene each time.
In the upper left room, Cyclops (shoots red optic blasts) is training by himself. His starting X-Gene already encodes a full solution to this scenario, but Cyclops is a dedicated team leader and so he practices over and over to make sure he can repeat the process. A new X-Gene only replaces the old X-Gene if it is still a full solution. Over time, you may observe some drift in his X-Gene - there is some redundancy in the genetic code, and some phenotype changes are also neutral.
In the upper right room, Cyclops is joined by three teammates: Jean Grey (telekinesis that deactivates Sentinels), Iceman (makes ice blocks that melt), and Jubilee (shoots short-range fireworks). This Cyclops also starts with the same X-Gene encoding a full solution to this room. That’s good, because while his teammates start with the same X-Gene (think gene duplication), they start in locations that make them totally useless; they are by-standers. Collectively, they are subject to the same selection; they collectively update their X-Genes only if the new versions also represent a full solution. Initially, that means Cyclops’ X-Gene is under strong selection while the others’ just drift.
However, it is possible that over time, the teammates will start to chip in. At that point, you may observe more changes in Cyclops’ X-Gene getting fixed. And some of those changes may mean his X-Gene no longer encodes a full solution all on his own. That’s where the bottom (smaller) four rooms come in. They show what happens if each of the four teammates had to use their current X-Genes (from the upper right room) in solo exercises. No selection is applied based on the performance in these rooms; they are just there to monitor whether Cyclops’ X-Gene still encodes a full solution to this scenario.
That page will loop for 250 generations, then replay the last functional solution. It takes 30-40 minutes on my computer. You can:
- Watch it and see what happens. You may see Cyclops become dependent on his teammates or you may not; this is a random walk that does not select for that outcome.
- Let it run and check it at the end. The animation will “freeze” on the last frame when it is done. If the little Cyclops in the small, lower left room still has Sentinels in there with him, then the team X-Genes from the upper right have evolved such that they are collectively functional but Cyclops’ X-Gene is not functional by itself.
- Go here and watch one such result I already found for you: Danger Room
If you choose option 3, you’ll see the end result of a lineage where first Jubilee’s X-Gene mutated so that she started to attack one of the Sentinels, and then Cyclops’ X-Gene mutated so that some of his shots go sideways instead of down at that Sentinel. Neither of those outcomes was specifically selected for; they were obtained with option 2.
If anyone tries 1 or 2 and gets an interesting result, you can copy the Best Genome text and send it to me, and I can make a page that will animate that result.