Electric Sheep
Electric Sheep is a screensaver in the computer or video animated fractal images happening and to participate together with all other computers on which the screen saver is running to the elaborate calculation of newer fractal images and their animation. Partly because the computer determine how the recalculated fractals will look, it is natural to refer to them as " dreams " of the computer, or as sheep, based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick ( filmed as " Blade Runner "). Electric Sheep had the beginning of 2011 half a million users.
Operation
The screensaver plays more on the hard disk cached MPEG-2 animations with merging randomly generated fractal images, as the sheep (English sheep ) are referred to. Each sheep has a sort of genetic code, namely a complex equation that mathematically describes its appearance and animation. While Electric Sheep running on the computer, it connects to other computers on which just runs this screensaver and share this computer their free computing capacity in order to " think up " new sheep to calculate frames of animation ( render ) and all calculations are done animations of sheep with other computers exchange information about BitTorrent.
The users can rate which sheep please them well and which are not. Beautiful sheep let the computer continue to mutate, try a similar design to produce animations, so to speak, calculate the offspring or descendants of these sheep. Sheep that find little favor among users will soon be deleted from the cache on the hard drive and the computer to listen to, they further develop and reproduce. Users can also develop even sheep and further survival in the herd of sheep embed (English flock ).
Formation
Building on iterated function systems Scott Draves in 1992 developed the so-called Fractal Flames ( algorithm- generated fractal images and animations ). The software, which could render Fractal Flames, has published Draves as open source on the Internet. Since home computer only with great loss of time could render images and animations with this software, it was initially only used by companies for computer-generated special effects to mainframes. In 1999, SETI @ home, the coupled computational power of many home computers for complex calculations to use knew Draves Electric Sheep wrote a SETI @ home -like screen saver, with which he could distribute the computation of Fractal Flames on any number of computers.
First Draves wanted to leave the appearance of fractal animations alone the " imagination " of the machine (ie randomly). The users and fans of his screen saver but have soon learned by trial and error the " genetic code " of the sheep ( ie the parameters of its defining equation ) to modify so that aesthetically pleasing animations were created. Draves decided in the gene pool of the " flock of sheep " take the creations of its users.
Today's sheep are designed mainly by fractal fans. The computers they can mutate and compute smooth transitions from one animation to the other. However, the transition animations are again great source of inspiration and basis for the creation designers.
Since April 20, 2012 there is also a wallpaper version for Android.