Electric Sheep

Developer(s)| Scott Draves
Initial release| 1999; 27 years ago (1999)
Stable release|

3.0.2 on Mac, 3.0.2 on Windows

Operating system| Linux, macOS, Microsoft Windows, Android, Apple TV, iPadOS, iOS
Type| Screensaver
License| Client: GNU General Public License
Server: not available for 2.7.x
Website| www.electricsheep.org
Another sample sheep.

Electric Sheep is a volunteer computing project for animating and evolving fractal flames, which are in turn distributed to the networked computers, which display them as a screensaver.

## Contents

* 1 Process
* 2 See also
* 3 Notes
* 4 References
* 5 External links

## 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).[1]

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."[2]

The name "Electric Sheep" is taken from the title of Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The title mirrors the nature of the project: computers (androids) who have started running the screensaver begin rendering (dreaming) the fractal movies (sheep).

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 with several of its parameters animated. 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.[3] 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.[4]

The screensaver was created and released as free software by Scott Draves in 1999 and continues to be developed by him and a team of about five engineers.[5]

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.[6][7]

## See also

* Evolutionary art
* List of volunteer computing projects
* Software art

## Notes

1. ↑ "Scott Draves - TRIANGULATION". triangulationblog.com. http://www.triangulationblog.com/2011/01/scott-draves.html.
2. ↑ Mitchell Whitelaw (2004). Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life. MIT Press. pp 155.
3. ↑ Scott, Draves. "remix and reuse". https://gold.electricsheep.org/license/.
4. ↑ Acosta, Raquel (22 September 2011). "Should Lawyers Dream of Electric Sheep? Digital Art: A Dynamic Misfit in a Static System". http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/should-lawyers-dream-of-electric-sheep-digital-art-a-dynamic-misfit-in-a-static-system.
5. ↑ Draves, Scott (2005). "The Electric Sheep Screen-Saver: A Case Study in Aesthetic Evolution". in Rothlauf, Franz; Branke, Jürgen; Cagnoni, Stefano et al. (in en). Applications of Evolutionary Computing. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 3449. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. pp. 458–467. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-32003-6_46. ISBN 978-3-540-32003-6. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-540-32003-6_46.
6. ↑ "#711284 - RM: electricsheep -- RoQA; orphaned, RC-buggy, licence problems - Debian Bug report logs". https://bugs.debian.org/711284#23.
7. ↑ "#669356 - electricsheep unsuitable for Debian main? - Debian Bug report log". https://bugs.debian.org/669356.

## References

* Draves, Scott (March 31, 2005). "The Electric Sheep Screen-Saver: A Case Study in Aesthetic Evolution" (PDF). EvoMusArt05. http://draves.org/evomusart05/. —Technical paper about the project.

## External links

* No URL found. Please specify a URL here or add one to Wikidata.
* on GitHub

* v
* t
* e

Fractal software

* Digital art
* Graphics software
* Fractal art

Open-source|

* Apophysis
* Blender
* Fyre
* Kalles Fraktaler
* MilkDrop
* Sterling

GNU|

* Electric Sheep
* GIMP
* openPlaG
* XaoS

Freeware|

* Fractint

Retail|

| Cross-platform|

* Bryce
* Chaotica
* Maple
* Wolfram Mathematica

|

Windows only|

* Ultra Fractal
* VisSim

Scenery generator|

* MojoWorld Generator
* Picogen
* Terragen
* VistaPro

Found objects|

* Burning Ship fractal
* Jerusalem cube
* Julia set
* Mandelbox
* Mandelbrot set
* Mandelbulb

Related|

* Computer-generated imagery
* Fractal compression
* Fractal landscape
* Fractal flame
* Iterated function system
* Mathematical visualization
* Orbit trap

* Category

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GNU Project

History|

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Public
speakers|

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Other topics|

* GNU/Linux naming controversy
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* v
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Fractals

Characteristics|

* Fractal dimensions
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Iterated function
system|

* Barnsley fern
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Strange attractor|

* Multifractal system

L-system|

* Fractal canopy
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Escape-time
fractals|

* Burning Ship fractal
* Julia set
* Filled
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* Misiurewicz point
* Newton fractal
* Tricorn
* Mandelbox
* Mandelbulb

Rendering techniques|

* Buddhabrot
* Orbit trap
* Pickover stalk

Random fractals|

* Brownian motion
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* Fractal landscape
* Lévy flight
* Percolation theory
* Self-avoiding walk

People|

* Georg Cantor
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Other|

* "How Long Is the Coast of Britain?"
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* List of fractals by Hausdorff dimension
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Mathematics and art

Concepts|

* Algorithm
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Forms|

* Algorithmic art
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Artworks|

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Artists|

| Renaissance|

* Paolo Uccello
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|

19th–20th Century|

* William Blake
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* Salvador Dalí
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* M. C. Escher
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Contemporary|

* Max Bill
* Martin and Erik Demaine
* Scott Draves
* Jan Dibbets
* John Ernest
* Helaman Ferguson
* Peter Forakis
* Bathsheba Grossman
* George W. Hart
* Desmond Paul Henry
* John A. Hiigli
* Anthony Hill
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* A Bird in Flight
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Theorists|

| Ancient|

* Polykleitos
* Canon
* Vitruvius
* De architectura

|

Renaissance|

* Luca Pacioli
* De divina proportione
* Piero della Francesca
* De prospectiva pingendi
* Leon Battista Alberti
* De pictura
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* Sebastiano Serlio
* Regole generali d'architettura
* Andrea Palladio
* I quattro libri dell'architettura
* Albrecht Dürer
* Vier Bücher von Menschlicher Proportion

Romantic|

* Frederik Macody Lund
* "Ad Quadratum"
* Jay Hambidge
* "The Greek Vase"
* Samuel Colman
* "Nature's Harmonic Unity"

Modern|

* Owen Jones
* The Grammar of Ornament
* Ernest Hanbury Hankin
* The Drawing of Geometric Patterns in Saracenic Art
* G. H. Hardy
* A Mathematician's Apology
* George David Birkhoff
* Aesthetic Measure
* Douglas Hofstadter
* Gödel, Escher, Bach
* Nikos Salingaros
* The 'Life' of a Carpet

Publications|

* Journal of Mathematics and the Arts

Organizations|

* Ars Mathematica
* The Bridges Organization
* European Society for Mathematics and the Arts
* Goudreau Museum of Mathematics in Art and Science
* Institute For Figuring
* Museum of Mathematics

Related topics|

* Droste effect
* Mathematical beauty
* Patterns in nature
* Sacred geometry

* Category

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