electric sheep 2.7b16c Beta

electric sheep 2.7b16c Beta owes its name to Philip K. Dicks novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. It realizes the collective dream of sleeping computers from all over the internet.

Major Features:

1. Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver created by Scott Draves. It's run by thousands of people all over the world, and 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?.
2. 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.
3. You may take a tour of the sheep web site and related documents. Don't miss the archive and lineages of top sheep from the current generation.
4. 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.
5. 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.