The Interpretation of Dreams: An Explanation of the Electric Sheep Distributed Screen-saver

The name Electric Sheep comes from Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. It realizes the collective dream of sleeping computers from all over the Internet. Electric Sheep is a distributed screen-saver that harnesses idle computers into a render farm with the purpose of animating and evolving artificial life-forms. The project is an attention vortex. It illustrates the process by which the longer and closer one studies something, the more detail and structure appears. 1. The Client When the software is activated, the screen goes black and an animated 'sheep' appears. In parallel, the screen-saver client contacts the server and joins the distributed computation of new sheep, an idea inspired by the SETI@home project [1]. The screen-saver is a window into a visual space shared among all users. Clients render JPEG frames and upload them to the server. When all the frames are ready the server compresses them into an MPEG animation. Each animation is the phenotype of an artificial organism, an "electric sheep". Clients download the MPEG sheep and display them one after another in a continuous, ever-changing sequence. About once every ten minutes a new sheep is born and distributed to all active clients. Each sheep is an animated fractal flame [2]. Example still frames appear in Figure 1. The shape is specified by a string of 150 real numbers—a genetic code of sorts. Some of the codes are chosen at random by the server with heuristics to avoid malformed sheep, somewhat like spontaneous abortion. Most of the rest are derived from the current population according to a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over.