Electric Sheep

Infobox_Software
name = Electric Sheep

caption =


developer = Scott Draves
latest_release_version = 2.6.X
latest_release_date =
operating_system = Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows
genre = Screensaver
license = GNU General Public License
website = [http://www.electricsheep.org/ www.electricsheep.org]

Electric Sheep is a distributed computing project for animating and evolving fractal flames, which are in turn distributed to the networked computers, which display them as a screensaver on the individual node computers of the distributed network. The process is transparent to the casual user, who can simply install the software as a screensaver. Alternatively, the user may become more involved with the project, manually creating sheep (video files of animated fractal flames) for upload to the server.

According to Mitchell Whitelaw in his "Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life", "On the screen they are luminous, twisting, elastic shapes, abstract tangles and loops of glowing filaments." [Mitchell Whitelaw (2004). "Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life". MIT Press. pp 155.]

The name "Electric Sheep" is taken from the title of Philip K. Dick's novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?". The title mirrors the nature of the project: computers (androids) who have started running the screensaver begin rendering (dreaming) the fractal movies (sheep).

The sheep motif is carried over into other aspects of the project: the 100 or so sheep stored on the server at any time is referred to as 'the flock'; creating a new fractal by interpolating or combining the sheep's fractal code with that of another sheep is called mating/breeding; changes to the code are called mutations, etc.

The parameters that generate these movies (sheep) can be created in a few ways: they can be created and submitted by members of the electricsheep mailing list, members of the mailing list can download the parameters of existing sheep and tweak them, or sheep can be mated together automatically by the server or manually by server admins (nicknamed shepherds).

Users may vote on sheep that they like or dislike, and this voting is used for the genetic algorithm which generates new sheep. Each movie is a fractal flame with several of its parameters changed over time. The individual frames of which these movies consist are rendered using 'spare' processing cycles from idle computers on the distributed network of those running the screensaver application, and finished sheep (in the form of .mpg files) are distributed to the network using BitTorrent, a Peer-to-peer filesharing application which is included as part of the Electric Sheep application.

All sheep parameters and movies are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution license and automatically downloaded by the screen saver.

The screensaver was created and released as Free Software by Scott Draves in 1999 and continues to be developed by him and a team of about five engineers.

ee also

*List of distributed computing projects
*Software Art
*Evolutionary art

References

* -- Technical paper about the project.

External links

* [http://electricsheep.org/ The Electric Sheep project's main page]
*