Electric Sheep

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For other uses, see Electric Sheep (disambiguation).

Electric Sheep is a distributed computing project for generating, downloading, and playing movies of fractal flames while the screen saver is running, created by Scott Draves. The parameters that generate these movies, called sheep, can be created in a few ways: they can be created and submitted by members of the electricsheep mailing list, members of the mailing list can download the parameters of existing sheep and tweak them, or sheep can be mated together automatically by the server or manually by server admins (nicknamed shepherds). Users may vote on sheep that they like or dislike, and this voting is used for the genetic algorithm which generates new sheep. All sheep parameters and movies are distributed under the creative commons license and automatically downloaded by the screen saver. Each movie is a fractal flame with several of its parameters changed over time.

The phrase Electric Sheep is taken from the title of Philip K. Dick's novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", as the title mirrors the nature of the project: computers (Androids) who have started running the screensaver begin rendering (Dreaming) the fractal movies (Sheep).