Electric Sheep

[wine]

Yeah, check this out:

 

the electric sheep screen-saver

 

:confused: And I quote:

 

Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver run by thousands of people all over the world. It 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.

 

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.

 

 

Take a look for yourself, if it's real and true and they're not lying it's quite the nifty occulation.

 

What doth thy Hypographians thinkith? :cheer:

[Buffy]

Cool. It would be great if we could do more things like this, and not just to generate dreams of Electronic Sheep (or Cows as my kid would prefer).

 

A bit different than SETI@Home in that its about generating algorithms, but that's what's a bit scary: this thing would be a great mechanism for distributing trojans or root kits....caveat emptor....

 

Mysterious process,

Buffy

[wine]

Can anyone ellaborate on it's function?

[Buffy]

Its clearly a fractal image generator, seemingly consisting of a bunch of algorithms to generate the fractals that have oodles of parameters and ways to combine them.

 

They're pretty intense fractals (although short in their run-time of 4 seconds) but probably cost a lot of cpu to generate them, and so while its doing its screen saving by playing pregenerated sheep, its really stealing your cpu cycles to generate new ones, fiddling with the parameters of the "sheep parts."

 

This is mostly guessing with a cursory examination cuz I don't have the time to really read the docs or code. Its combining a bunch of well-understood concepts and ideas in to a cool little piece of massively distributed code.

 

Have fun!

 

More interesting at small scales,

Buffy

[alexander]

wow i posted about electric sheep OVER A YEAR AGO!

 

Ok, first it does not generate fractals, their is a base fractal image that the sheep are generated from and then they get crazy mathematics done to them to make them into those moving things you see as the result. Takes their servers about 5 minutes to generage a frame, and you as a sheep consumer may actually help them put those keyframes together (I did , i know, i generated over 3 gigs of videos on my 64 about a year ago)

 

now my friend has been working on something really cool, genetic algorithms, milk project, makes real cool animations, not too disimilar from sheep (obviously not as elaborate) and realtime on the pc... its frigging amazing, i'll get him to take a few shots and post them. sheep are good for VJing, milk files are better, faster and dont really require video editing for hours, and can actually be linked to music if someone was willing to write some code ;)

[Tormod]

But do androids dream of them?

[alexander]

i hope androids dream about something other then just electric sheep... for their own sake!

[wine]

Would dreams be seemingly random code generated that does not matter amongst the code that does?

[alexander]

it could be a random iteration of a genetic algorithm generating a picture...

[alexander]

found it, i should say remembered.

 

ok i was talking about ProjectM

Found here

 

Although this seems cool already, my friend actually wrote a hack for it, and exploiting the code began to generate new and cool algorithms that don't make sense in the math world, but seem to create crazy visualizations, a lot crazier then the pictures show. It was actually a hole he exploited in the older version, new version closed it, but he really have not had the time to write to the developers saying "look what i made, include it in your project"...

 

I'll show you what i mean by crazy math-wise

 

a line from one of his generated files reads:

per_frame_5=rot=.-5*sin(time*.-9--7-2)

 

and the thing is change this and change the time it takes to calculate it while displaying the animation making it different and usually not good-looking at all :confused:

[Michaelangelica]

But do androids dream of them?

They were fist invented by a mathamatics professor called Shaun Lamb.

 

Yea another post!