electric sheep 2.7b10 Beta

electric sheep 2.7b10 Beta is designed as a professional program that can allow you to realize the collective dream of sleeping computers from all over the internet.

When the screen-saver is activated, the screen goes black and an animated sheep appears. Behind the scenes, the screen-saver contacts a server and joins the parallel computation of new sheep. Every fifteen minutes 24/7 a new sheep is born and distributed to all clients for display. Each sheep is an animated fractal flame.

Each sheep is about 4 seconds long. Its shape, motion, and color are specified by a genetic code, a long string of numbers. If users see a sheep they like, they can press the up arrow key to vote for the sheep. 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.

The initial download of "Sheep" is about 200Mb, so be prepared to wait a little while. If you have a BitTorrent Client you can manually download the "Sheep" HERE and place them in your sheep cache directory. (C:WINDOWSSystem32electricsheep-cachempeg)

Major Features:

1. Each of the images in the column on the left side of these pages is a freshly rendered sheep, and on the right are individual frames from the sheep in progress. They are linked to the server's status pages with full resolution versions.
2. Note that the sheep are compressed in MPEG2 format which may not be playable by Windows Media Player unless you install a codec pack on Windows or Perian on the Mac.
3. Open source programs such as MPlayer, Media Player Classic, and VLC work fine however. Mac OSX users may need MPlayer or convert to quicktime.
4. You may also browse the archive of previous generations of sheep.