The Electric Sheep and their Dreams in High Fidelity

Google Tech Talks
September 14, 2006

Scott Draves a.k.a. Spot is a software artist residing in San Francisco. His award-winning work has appeared in Wired Magazine, the Prix Ars Electronica, the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and on the dance-floor at the Sonar festival in Barcelona.

ABSTRACT

Electric Sheep is a distributed screen-saver that harnesses idle computers into a render farm with the purpose of animating and evolving artificial life-forms known as sheep. The votes of the users form the basis for the fitness function for a genetic algorithm on a space of abstract animations. Users also may design sheep by hand for inclusion in the gene pool.

This cyborg mind composed of…