# Electric Sheep--neato screen saver **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [June 28, 2009, 11:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/electric-sheep-neato-screen-saver/501296 "2009-06-28T23:57:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Frylock](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ce7236/32.png) [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)\ **Post date:** [June 28, 2009, 11:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/electric-sheep-neato-screen-saver/501296/1 "2009-06-28T23:57:04Z")
[http://community.sheepserver.net/](http://community.sheepserver.net/) > [@](#): > > Electric Sheep is an open source screen saver 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 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. You can also design your own sheep and submit them to the gene pool. It takes some time to get going. When I ran it right after downloading it, the patterns seemed like nothing special. But when I ran it again a few hours later, I guess it had finished downloading the “evolved” patterns and it really was worth just watching at for ooh and aah purposes for several minutes at least. ---
**Author:** ![Covered\_In\_Bees](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/7ab992/32.png) [@Covered\_In\_Bees](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Covered_In_Bees)\ **Post date:** [June 28, 2009, 11:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/electric-sheep-neato-screen-saver/501296/2 "2009-06-28T23:58:48Z")
Haven’t read the link yet, but your quoted section sounds really cool!