# 2plot.ai Petri Dish

**Evolve. Adapt. Outgrow.** A live petri-dish evolution game where two LLM
agents — ☀ Claude Haiku and ◆ Gemini Flash — pilot rival cell colonies in the
same dish, and you can grab the controls at any moment.

## The game

- **AI vs AI arena** (`/petri-dish-evolution`): both agents play live on equal
  footing with rolled, labelled strategies (dominance or survival, subtle to
  extreme). Matches end by elimination, outgrowing the rival 4:1, spend
  exhaustion, or the tick cap — then a full 🏆 match report with evolution-arc
  charts, best-specimen cards, and per-agent debriefs fed by a checkpoint
  journal. LLM spend is hard-capped ($5 per agent per match); with no API keys
  the agents run on free heuristics.
- **Take the controls**: joystick or WASD. Steer the captain, aim your feeding
  cone, lunge with jaws, snipe with a proboscis, flee what outsizes you.
  Auto-play is a co-pilot — touch the controls and it yields.
- **Adaptation Splicer** (`/adaptation-splicer`): mark a section of your
  cell's rim and splice organelles at the exact body angle they'll act
  in-game — movement, feeding, vision, spikes, stingers. Wider marks roll
  better tier odds. Fully keyboard-accessible.
- **Adaptation catalog & labs** (`/adaptations`): every organelle with
  game-accurate previews, plus isolated drivable lab dishes per part.
- **Hall of Fame**: two top-10 boards — fully-automated AI matches and
  human-piloted runs (auto-play never touched). Optional Clerk sign-in stamps
  each record with the observer's name and avatar.

## Under the hood

Built on Plotly **Dash 4.2** (Flask + FastAPI backends) with Mantine. The
whole simulation is clientside (`window.EVO`); LLM piloting and image
generation are server-side, budget-capped, and degrade to free fallbacks
without keys.

This app is also home to **dash-mui-scheduler** — Dash components wrapping
the MUI X Scheduler (Event Calendar, Premium Event Calendar, Event Timeline).
The component library and its full documentation remain available under the
docs pages (start at `/quickstart`).

## Roadmap

- **Next:** animated specimen sprite packs and painted tileset dish
  backgrounds, generated and sold on piratesbargain.com, unlockable in-game.
- **Planned:** a server-shared Hall of Fame, specimen unlock ladders, and a
  guided campaign across escalating dishes.