Electric Sheep is a free & open source screensaver created by Scott Draves. It is by far the most beautiful and captivating screensaver I’ve ever came across. It not only generates amazing images, but it does it “on the fly”. When the computer “falls asleep” it starts communicating and collaborating with thousands of computers around the world morphing computer animations known as “sheep”. The result of this constant transformation is what some call a collective “android dream”, an reference 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.
You may take a tour of the sheep web site and related documents. Don’t miss the archive (aka the best of the best “sheep”) and lineages (aka “sheep” family trees) of top sheep from the current generation.
From electricsheep.org
As amazing as this app is (I’ve never stared at a screensaver for more than 5 seconds before!!!), it is quite a challenge to install for someone who doesn’t know much about computers, so to avoid frustration read all the info on the download page and the readme.txt that comes with the download packages.
Enjoy!!!
Related Links:
The Electric Sheep’s Website
The Electric Sheep on Wikipedia