![Electricsheep-0-1000](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/Electricsheep-0-1000.jpg)
Electric Sheep is a
volunteer computing
Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing in which people donate their computers' unused resources to a research-oriented project, and sometimes in exchange for credit points. The fundamental idea behind it is that a modern desktop co ...
project for animating and evolving
fractal flame
Fractal flames are a member of the iterated function system class of fractals created by Scott Draves in 1992. Draves' open-source code was later ported into Adobe After Effects graphics softwareChris Gehman and Steve Reinke (2005). ''The Sharp ...
s, which are in turn distributed to the networked computers, which display them as a
screensaver
A screensaver (or screen saver) is a computer program that blanks the display screen or fills it with moving images or patterns when the computer has been idle for a designated time. The original purpose of screensavers was to prevent phosphor ...
.
Process
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 a fractal flame file for upload to the server where it is rendered into a video file of the animated fractal flame. As the screensaver entertains the user, their computer is also used for rendering commercial projects, sales of which keep the servers and developers running.
There are about 500,000 active users (monthly uniques).
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."
The name "Electric Sheep" is taken from the title of
Philip K. Dick's novel ''
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
''Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?'' (retroactively retitled ''Blade Runner: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?'' in some later printings) is a dystopian science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick, first published in 1968. Th ...
''. The title mirrors the nature of the project: computers (androids) who have started running the screensaver begin rendering (dreaming) the fractal movies (
sheep
Sheep or domestic sheep (''Ovis aries'') are domesticated, ruminant mammals typically kept as livestock. Although the term ''sheep'' can apply to other species in the genus '' Ovis'', in everyday usage it almost always refers to domesticated ...
).
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
Fractal flames are a member of the iterated function system class of fractals created by Scott Draves in 1992. Draves' open-source code was later ported into Adobe After Effects graphics softwareChris Gehman and Steve Reinke (2005). ''The Sharp ...
with several of its parameters
animated
Animation is a method by which still figures are manipulated to appear as moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Today, most ani ...
. 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 .avi files) are distributed to the network.
The computer-generated sheep parameters and movies are distributed under the
Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (CC-BY-NC) license; user-generated sheep parameters are under the
Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license. Both are automatically downloaded by the screen saver. The underlying copyright issues raised by generative, distributed digital art projects involve novel legal issues that the current copyright system can not understand or handle.
The screensaver was created and released as
free software
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...
by
Scott Draves
Scott Draves is the inventor of Fractal Flames and the leader of the distributed computing project Electric Sheep. He also invented patch-based texture synthesis and published the first implementation of this class of algorithms. He is also a ...
in 1999 and continues to be developed by him and a team of about five engineers.
The 2.7.x series differs from the old versions. It has a new logo, higher quality sheep and other features. It has switched to a
freemium model in which the server software is not available and much of the computed data is not available under a free license, which led to its removal from
Debian.
See also
*
Evolutionary art
Evolutionary art is a branch of generative art, in which the artist does not do the work of constructing the artwork, but rather lets a system do the construction. In evolutionary art, initially generated art is put through an iterated process o ...
*
List of volunteer computing projects
This is a comprehensive list of volunteer computing projects; a type of distributed computing where volunteers donate computing time to specific causes. The donated computing power comes from idle CPUs and GPUs in personal computers, video game co ...
*
Software art
Software art is a work of art where the creation of software, or concepts from software, play an important role; for example software applications which were created by artists and which were intended as artworks. As an artistic discipline software ...
Notes
References
* —Technical paper about the project.
External links
*
*
Archives of previous generations of Sheep
{{Computer science
Computer art
Volunteer computing projects
Screensavers
Fractal software
Software using the GPL license