Alpha Core

It’s not the next Sony AIBO/QRIO and it doesn’t include batteries. I’m talking about Electric Sheep, a free, open source screen saver created by Scott Draves, run by thousands of people all over the world. When computers “sleep”, the screen saver comes to life and the computers communicate with each other over 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?. You could call it a global computer-generated art project.

How does it work exactly? Fractal flames are rendered as PNG images (depending on the machine, this typically takes multiple seconds for a single frame) by distributed client software (i.e. the screensaver itself), which are then transferred across the internet to an Electric Sheep server. The server stitches these images together as a compressed 800×600 MPEG-2 video file, called a “sheep” (most are around 4 seconds long), which are organized in “flocks”, e.g. the screenshot above is a (resized) still taken from sheep 10708 of flock 243. The finished sheep are automatically downloaded by the client software. While the screen saver is running, sheep are selected from the available ones in a way to result (if possible) in a smooth, seamless, mesmerizing animation: often several sheep are candidates as a continuation of a currently playing sheep. Anyone watching one of the screen savers 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.

Electric Sheep is available for PC (Windows & Linux) and Mac (OS X) and installs like a breeze. Here’s a short sample clip (with reduced quality) to give an idea what it actually looks like:

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