When Robots Dream Do They Dream of Electric Sheep?
A short time ago I was talking with a friend about the recent passing of Arthur C. Clarke. I was fascinated by this man's ideas. He had very realistic long term thinking. Much of his fiction has since turned into reality as we know it. Well, while talking to this friend we somehow got talking about fractals, which Clark described as the "Thumbprint of God." I remembered a documentary he did on fractals and watched it again on google video (link to it at end of story). When Arthur Clarke left this planet we lost a man who pointed us to some fantastic destinations. The destinations just within this one topic are mind boggling. I urge you to check this out.
So what do Arthur C. Clarke fractals and Electric Sheep have to do with one another?
Clarke called the mathematical discovery of fractals one of the most important discoveries of our era. Today, they are responsible for aiding compression algorithms in their shrinking of vast quantities of data into manageable size for digital transmission. This is very important for Satellite TV, Military Imaging, File Compression, you name it. While fractals are so very utilitarian in nature they are, concurrently, infinitely beautiful as well. By Infinite I mean Infinite. They can represent an entire stellar nebula in a simple equation. In fact the simple equation mirrors the things we find in nature. Perhaps it is not a complex equation to build a rose but a simple yet extremely dynamic and elegant equation? Until the advent of computing we couldn't do the iterations of calculation needed to see results. Even more, we still couldn't exploit these until the fairly recent level of computing power came along. This used to be the realm of supercomputing, now it can be on our desktop.
In part my friend and I were discussing this because of my article on Linux - ProjectM - Amarok Milkdrop Visualizations. I installed the WinAmp Windows music manager program which includes the music visualizations on their computer. The WinAmp visualizations are very much along the same vein as watching fractals. After some discussion and email back and forth about the above topics, along with music creation, God, and computers, I went looking for fractal generators, since I hadn't played with any for let's say 20 years. I found a living screensaver called ElectricSheep. Much like the SETI project, the screen saver harnesses computers from all over the Net to form a vast parallel computing complex, all contributing to growing Electric Sheep. These sheep have a "binary genome" - they live, die and propagate. You get to watch and contribute to their evolution.
Electric Sheep realizes the collective dream of sleeping computers
from all over the internet. It's a distributed screensaver that
harnesses idle computers into a rendering 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 their computer simultaneously goes to work creating new sheep
and sharing its results with all other users.
Each sheep is about four seconds long. Its shape, motion, and color are
specified by a genetic code composed of 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 aesthetic
evolution of the flock. Users can also download software to manually
design genomes and post them to the server where they join the flock.
Now the Best thing is it's OPEN SOURCE, FREE and for LINUX or WINDOWS. Check it out below and visit the Electric Sheep site to download it. To understand better and see some astounding images watch and listen to these videos:
Electric Sheep Demo (music added)
This resolution does not do it justice, imagine a hi-res full screen.
The Arthur Clarke Documentary on Fractals
Thumbprint of God - Colors of Infinity
Infinite Journey Fractal Video Mandlebrot Set
Google also has an in-depth Tech Talk on the development of
the Electric Sheep Screen Saver by its inventor.
To see more examples try searching google videos for Electric Sheep or see the Electric Sheep website at www.electricsheep.com. For those people still inclined to pay really large sums of money and give away your privacy even more, M$ Windows users can try installing Winamp to see Milkdrop Visualizations as well .
When Robots Dream Do They Dream of Electric Sheep?
