Wonderfunk is an interactive blog focusing on dialogs related to gadgets, tech, web 2.0, music, design, art, my life and likes, how-to's, MAKE culture, instructables, and just general cool link aggregation and commentary.

23 August 2007

Electric Sheep Rocks

Ok so you all are aware of distributed 'grid' computing, as well as, peer to peer file sharing.....and everybody loves 'smoke and lightning' screen savers. Electric Sheep takes all of this to the next level as far as I am concerned. Ok so it is a kick ass screensaver that allows you to vote as a new scene (or as they call them sheep) comes on the screen with a gladiator style thumbs up or thumbs down. In the background it is 1) registering your vote and 2) using bittorrent to download new highly rated sheep to your PC. Basically guaranteeing a constantly refreshing batch of killer screensaver scenes. Please check this one out, you won't be disappointed.

From electricsheep.org:


Electric Sheep realizes the collective dream of sleeping computers
from all over the internet. It's a distributed screen-saver that
harnesses idle computers into a render farm with the purpose of
animating and evolving artificial life-forms.

All the software is open source and users may participate in the
network freely and anonymously. Anyone can download and install it.
When their computer is idle and goes to sleep, the sheep animations
appear, and in parallel the computer goes to work creating new sheep
and sharing its results with all other users.

Each sheep is about 4 seconds long. Its shape, motion, and color are
specified by a genetic code, a long string of numbers. If a user sees
a sheep they like, they may press the up arrow key to vote for it.
Sheep that receive more votes live longer and are more likely to
reproduce. These votes form a fitness function for the esthetic
evolution of the flock. Users can also download software to manually
design genomes and post them to the server where they join the flock.

I believe the free flow of code is an increasingly important social
and artistic force. The proliferation of powerful computers with
high-bandwidth network connections forms the substrate of an expanding
universe. The electric sheep and we their shepherds are colonizing
this new frontier.







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