So this is prolly the coolest thing I've seen my computer do yet.
(Besides free pr0n of course...)
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.
http://sheepserver.net/v2d6/gen/202/5027/00202=05027=05027=05027.mpg
http://sheepserver.net/v2d6/gen/202/4921/00202=04921=04921=04921.mpg
http://sheepserver.net/v2d6/gen/202/4750/00202=04750=04750=04750.mpg
If you google "Electric Sheep Torrents" you can find 100s of new sheep.
Leave the screen saver running over night and it will download new breeds depending on what sheep were voted for previously.
The link below shows how previous sheep have grown.
http://electricsheep.org/archive/generation-165/best.cgi?menu=tree&p=4
Electric Sheep realizes the collective dream of sleeping computers from all over the internet. It's a distributed screen-saver that harnesses idle computers into a render farm with the purpose of animating and evolving artificial life-forms.
All the software is open source and users may participate in the network freely and anonymously. Anyone can download and install it. When their computer is idle and goes to sleep, the sheep animations appear, and in parallel the computer goes to work creating new sheep and sharing its results with all other users.
Each sheep is about 4 seconds long. Its shape, motion, and color are specified by a genetic code, a long string of numbers. If a user sees a sheep they like, they may press the up arrow key to vote for it. 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.
I believe the free flow of code is an increasingly important social and artistic force. The proliferation of powerful computers with high-bandwidth network connections forms the substrate of an expanding universe. The electric sheep and we their shepherds are colonizing this new frontier.
Download and learn more at http://electricsheep.org/
Enjoy =)