top sheep

electric sheep


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Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver created by Scott Draves. It's run by thousands of people all over the world, and 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.

You may take a tour of the sheep web site and related documents.

Kick-start your client
with a sheep pack.
How to reuse or exhibit
the sheep on your own.
Download more sheep
faster with BitTorrent.
Link with the Sheep and
Spotworks on MySpace.
 
fresh frames

donate All these moments will be lost in time,
like tears in rain.
buy the DVD

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License by spot at draves dot org.