There’s an interesting screensaver project over at electricsheep.org. From the website:
Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver run by thousands of people all over the world. It can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers “sleep”, the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as “sheep”. The result is a collective “android dream”, an homage to Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
Anyone watching one of these computers may vote for their favorite animations using the keyboard. The more popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over. Hence the flock evolves to please its global audience. You can also design your own sheep and submit them to the gene pool.
Real interesting.
This entry was posted on Saturday, September 8th, 2007 at 11:26 am and is filed under Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Been watching this for a while (been part of it occasionally too). It’s worth mentioning that several from the archive are downloadable–once you see the results, you might be even more interested :)
oh, awesome!
i recall reading about this a couple of years back but never got around to actually looking it up/dling it…
will do so now =D
A couple of my friends have this….i don’t dare get it. I can sit there staring at it for hours on end. It is, however, amazingly cool.
Got it about two weeks ago and shared the downloads across my network to my three computers. It is the most awsome and dynamic screensaver I’ve seen.
Only recommendation is to up to 25-30 frames from 23, and it seems more realistic.
I grabbed this and wasn’t too impressed off the start. Seemed like the same three over and over.. but today I’ve noticed that it’s changing a bit more. A lot of new patterns are showing up and it’s pretty cool.
yeah, I was getting that feeling too, but the three they keep showing are still pretty awesome
You have to let it run for some time to create/download new patterns. I would suggesting checking the FAQ, specifically:
http://electricsheep.wikispaces.com/Downloading+is+slow...
http://electricsheep.wikispaces.com/Determining+if+it+is+downloading
Keep in mind they use bittorrent to distribute the sheep, if you want to download them directly:
http://electricsheep.wikispaces.com/Downloading+Manually
Thanks mark, I figured out what was going on, like I said, over the next few days more patterns started showing up.
Only bad thing is it started lagging up my Xbox Live matches.. I couldn’t figure out what was causing my bad lag all of a sudden until I looked over at my PC and thought “DOH! SHEEP!”
Electricsheep is FTW!
This is pretty much what Spore by Will Wright is doing. It has players share their creature, thats only a couple KB, which you may fight with your own creature race thing. >.> Rawr
I’ve been using this screen saver for a few years now, and it never gets old. My 18 month old cousin will sit and stare at it; no matter what he’s been doing.
It’s easily the best screen saver I’ve ever seen.
I think if you want a cool screen saving you should do a search for “Folding@home”.
yea I saw this a few years ago. Badass stuff
Interesting interplay - let the computers “evolve” your sheep, or design a sheep. Evolution or intelligent design? Which will win?
Is letting screensavers evolve such a good idea? I mean, come on, hasn’t anyone seen Terminator? Sure they’re harmless now, but it’s only a matter of time before they go back in time and start killing.
I’ve been using this screensaver for about a year now. I love the way it looks, but it stopped mesmerizing me after the first month. Other people tend to stare at it, though. I have about 9 GB of sheep.
I’ve known about electric sheep for ages. I don’t use on my main laptop, but I do use it on my school laptop. I like it. I also use a program called Apophysis that makes some of the awesome fractals you see on electric sheep.
You can view the fractals I’ve made on my deviantart site.
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