Software 42240 Published by

Electric Sheep 2.7b15 has been released



When the screen-saver is activated, the screen goes black and an animated 'sheep' appears. Behind the scenes, the screen-saver contacts a server and joins the parallel computation of new sheep. Every fifteen minutes 24/7 a new sheep is born and distributed to all clients for display. Each sheep is an animated fractal flame.

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.

New in this version:
Compared to 2.6, this version has a more expressive visual language, higher resolution (double the pixels per sheep), no periodic stuttering, a better codec (x264), and a dynamic filter to smooth out the dust. And we have a new server with much more capacity (thanks dvlabs).

Universal Binary
License: Freeware
Requires: OS X 10.3/10.4/10.5
Size: 4.9Mb
Download