Electric Sheep

And now for something completely different.

I’ve always enjoyed screen savers. They outlived their original purpose of preventing phosphor burn-in long ago, but they’re art, and art…don’t need no reason….

My favorite, Dream Aquarium, is being ported to OS X, but it’s not ready yet. While waiting for it, I’m enjoying Electric Sheep, an homage to Philip K. Dick’s novel, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”.

Electric Sheep is a free, open-source screen saver; it runs on Windows, Linux, and the Mac.

The concept behind Electric Sheep is very interesting, using distributed processing to create amazing morphing fractal animations called “sheep”.

The sheep are beautiful and mesmerizing. You can vote on a sheep using the up and down arrows on the keyboard for ‘like’ and ‘dislike’, respectively. Popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm, producing a pleasing flock via natural selection.

Now tell me that’s not cool.

A couple of hints:

• It can take a few days for sheep to start appearing on your machine naturally, so it’s recommended to obtain a starter flock via one or more sheep packs.
• Electric Sheep can automatically play an iTunes playlist; I’ve found the dreamy soundtracks produced by pzizz to be very appropriate.

If all Electric Sheep did was display incredible fractal animations, it’d be one of the best screen savers available. Understanding what it really does is to say the least, impressive.

Baa….