downloading sheep, please wait...
Came across this screensaver yesterday.
I can't believe I've not seen this before...some of the renderings are amazing...
From the Licence Agreement:
"Electric Sheep is a distributed screen-saver. During normal operation
it uses the internet to contact the server (sheepserver.net) to
download MPEG animations, both with HTTP on port 80 and 8080, and also
by BitTorrent, which has been integrated into the client. Until it
downloads its first animation, the screen-saver displays just a black
screen and a logo. This takes several minutes, and depending on
network conditions and server load, perhaps much longer. Please be
patient, and let it run overnight before concluding there is a
problem.
The sheep (as the MPEG animations are called) that you get have been
rendered by users of the screen-saver all over the world. They are
distributed under a Creative Commons license, which means you can
reuse and remix them as long as you give credit to the Electric Sheep
as their origin.
Your computer too will participate in this rendering effort. So not
only will your computer download sheep, but also download sheep
genomes, render them into JPEG frames, and upload the results to the
server. No other information is sent to the server: the Electric
Sheep respect your privacy.
The shepherds (those who wrote the software and run the server) use
the sheep for commercial purposes in order to support the network and
develop it further. For example there's the Spotworks DVD, and
"Dreams in High Fidelity", a painting that evolves. Some jobs
rendered by the network may be for images or animations which are not
sheep at all, and will not appear in the screen-saver.
While you are watching the screen-saver, if you see a sheep you like
(or dislike) you may vote for it by pushing the up (or down) arrow
key. These votes are transmitted to the server and used to drive the
evolution of the sheep: sheep that receive more votes live longer and
have sex with each other, producing offspring with a family
resemblance.
If you are interested you can have more direct influence over the
sheep by downloading additional software to design your own sheep and
post them into the gene pool. They will then be rendered by the
network and eventually appear on screens all over the world. If they
prove popular, they will interbreed with the rest of the population,
and variations on them will appear too."