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aboutElectric Sheep is a collaborative abstract artwork founded by Scott Draves. It's run by thousands of people all over the world, and can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers "sleep", the Electric Sheep comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as "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.The result is a collective "android dream", blending man and machine to create an artificial lifeform.downloadThis program is recommended only if you have a high-bandwidth, always-on connection to the internet such as DSL or cable modem. It should download and display within a minute, but due to server load it may take a long time, please be patient, and press F2 to monitor its progress. When it's running, press F1 for help.Mac OSX v2.7b34 Download InstructionsWindows v2.7b34 Download InstructionsLinux v2.7b33 Download InstructionsAlso available for download: Sheep packs, old versions and source code.Electric SheepFirst created in 1999 by Scott Draves, the Electric Sheep is a form of artificial life, which is to say it is software that recreates the biological phenomena of evolution and reproduction though mathematics. The system is made up of man and machine, a cyborg mind with 450,000 participant computers and people all over the Internet.This is a distributed system, with all participating computers working together to form a supercomputer that renders animations, called "sheep", that everyone sees. The human participants guide the survival of the fittest by voting for their favorite animations in the flock. You can join this project by downloading the Electric Sheep Screensaver.Each participating computer follows mathematical instructions, Draves' Flame algorithm, to render its own piece of the larger work, as seen in the table at left. The images are sent back to a central server which compresses them into animations which are sent back out to the viewers. The electricsheep.org website shows the family tree for each sheep, including its parents and offspring, and viewers can track family resemblance. The artist's Clade series shows a selection of family members in high resolution.Like Draves' other software art, the Electric Sheep code is open source, which has allowed it to benefit from code contributions from many enthusiastic programmers. Now Draves serves as head Shepherd on a project with many participants.The most popular sheep from the current flock can be viewed on the live server, or you can browse the archive.