Electric sheep
Thanks to a link on 2lmc spool, I installed the truly wonderful Electric Sheep screensaver. In fact, it’s a rather superior species of screen saver, in which your own computer becomes part of a huge network of interconnected machines collaboratively creating and rendering lovely fractal-like, abstract, moving images, which constantly shift and morph into one another. These images are called sheep. What’s more, if you like one of the images you see you can vote for it by pressing the up arrow. The votes are then used as part of a weighting process in a genetic algorithm to breed more sheep. Popular sheep live longer (and presumably reproduce more), and so the sheep evolve into ever more beautiful forms.
The still images on the site really don’t do it justice, so it’s worth trying it out for yourself. However, you do need a pretty decent network connection, and you have to be patient while waiting for the first one to appear. Then you’ll be sitting in front of the screen for hours, wide-eyed and saying, “Oh, man—-look at all the pretty patterns and colours. Those electric sheep are really hoopy froods.”
