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Electric sheep

electricsheep.org

74 pointsshrikant20 comments

If you like this, you should definitely checkout the gallery, the simple python source and all other beauties at Andrej Bauer's http://www.random-art.org/.

He has an interesting story of migrating from a ocaml + cduce implementation to one based on Django and javascript. The javascript source was generated by compiling the original Ocaml sources using Ocamljs. The newer version being based on javascript, one can run it in one's browser.

For the story: http://math.andrej.com/2010/08/17/random-art-and-the-law-of-...

Both grad students at cmu SCS at the same time, too

For those interested in creating their own fractals, I've written a GUI editor in python for doing just that:

https://launchpad.net/fr0st

In case you are thinking of running this, it is fantastically memory/disk space expensive. The fractals are rendered as movies and saved to your disk.

This is pretty awesome! The site seems to be a bit overloaded though, direct link to youtube video with description: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz2pThxf3YU

Electric Sheep is a collaborative abstract artwork 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 Electric Sheep 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.

Thanks, glad you all like it.

This open source network is the popular side of my art. For a peek at the good stuff, see http://picasaweb.google.com/scottdraves/Presskit02# including the recent projections at MoMA.

You can download a sample at 1080p: http://www.archive.org/details/HighFidelityDemo (control-click the quicktime link and save to your desktop, skip the embedded player).

I think the name misses the point Dick was making in the novel (and throughout a lot of his work). It's about what exactly makes us "human", and how maybe it's possible to create something find all the qualities that we believe define humanity outside of humans, thus taking value away from being humane, or maybe adding value to it. The question "Do androids dream with electric sheep?"is just an example of this. "Human is" is another excelent short story by Dick on the subject.

The fractals are very nice though =)

Have never been more touched by any other science fiction movie. It lingered within my mind for days.

The thing with Science Fiction is that it's hardly a genre. As Asimov shows in "The Caves of Steel", it's mor ofa set of conventions about setting and style that can be applied to basically any genre. So you have immensely varied works of sci-fi that have bassically no relation between one another. That leads to someone loving a work of science fiction, trying other science fiction looking for something similar, and fiding that there's nothing similar to what he liked in other works.

But if you are searching for something similar to Bladerunner, a TV series of the same vein and tone would be Ergo Proxy.

> The thing with Science Fiction is that it's hardly a genre. As Asimov shows in "The CAves of Steel", it's mor ofa set of conventions about setting and style

I respectfully disagree. Yes, a lot of writing gets lumped in as "science fiction" because it has space and robots and lasers, but you can look for science fiction as a genre. I define it as fiction that explores questions raised by developments in science and technology. "Do Androids..." was clearly sci-fi, dealing with questions about what it is to be human, but also about if we could create souls, etc. (As an aside, it's a direction of thought I really wish the new BSG would've focused more on, as opposed to mythology/political thriller)

William Gibson has been consistently good with writing what I describe as science fiction. So was Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon, Diamond Age, even the System of the World trilogy). Conversely, Star Wars would not be considered science fiction, just fantasy with spaceships.

So you would say "The Caves of Steel", "The men in the high Castle", "Flowers For Algernon", "The Right Hand of Darkness" and "Star Trek" are part of the same genre? I can't really agree with that, I can't not call any of those Science Fiction.

I have not read any of the books, and watched very little Star Trek, to be honest. Maybe I should distinguish "literary science fiction" and "pop science fiction" (without making any value judgements, I thoroughly enjoyed Star Wars 4-6)? If you want to deal with Asimov specifically, I can speak to what I remember about the Foundation books, which dealt with the outcome of being able to accurately model/simulate/predict societies, to the point of setting events in motion so as to shape a society thousands of years out from now.

I consider that 'literary' science fiction, just as I do the earlier mentioned Cryptonomicon, even though there were no futuristic technologies in it.

Well the Star Trek franchise had an episode touching on the ideas of the rest of them...Data playing Sherlock Holmes, a planet run by Nazis, temporary acquisition of special abilities and The United Federation of Planets. [Star Trek is the Kevin Bacon of SciFi]

You missed "The Right Hand of Darkness". And I admit I haven't watched too much Star Trek. But I think the point still stands that this works are clearly of different genres, and still it would seem wrong to say any of them isn't science fiction.

If you're referring to Le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness," I would propose that the Hainish universe's Ekumen and Star Trek's Federation share a similar flavor. Moreover, both bodies of work engage in speculative anthropology, although Le Guin's treatment has, in my opinion, considerably greater philosophical depth. This is not necessarily to dispute your contention, but just to point out that they share thematic elements beyond just the science fiction umbrella.

Why do you think The Man in the High Castle is Sci-Fi? Is it just because it's an alternate-history story?

"I define it as fiction that explores questions raised by developments in science and technology."

Yup. A lot of people think that SciFi is about technology - but it's not. It's about people, and how they can react to said technology.

I always found the movie pretty boring, but it's based on a very good novel.

I didn't name it "Electric Sheep" to comment on the meaning of PKDick's book (or the movie). I use that name because screen-savers come on when your computer goes to sleep.... and dreams.

I'd definitely be running this if I wasn't turning my screen off when I'm not using the computer, and if I didn't rather spend my CPU cycle on scientific/medical distributed computing projects (BOINC Rosetta@home, primarily).

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