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.
This screensaver is one that communicates with a central server and gets stuff for it to calculate. it then responds with the information, adn it forms computer images known as fractals (look it up if you dont understand what a fractal is)
then the program makes a new fractal that is very similar to the one just created and does that and animates them into small videos.
Your computer automatically downloads these videos whenever the screensaver is active and plays them on your desktop.
Many of them are truely amazing and i reccomend this screensaver to everyone!
It animates images that are really detailed and its really cool, like this one. this is just a screen shot from one of the animations:
Site:
http://www.electricsheep.org
