electric sheep owes its name to Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. It realizes the collective dream of sleeping computers from all over the internet.

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.

The initial download of "Sheep" is about 200Mb, so be prepared to wait a little while. If you have a BitTorrent Client you can manually download the "Sheep" HERE and place them in your sheep cache directory. (C:WINDOWSSystem32electricsheep-cachempeg)