| Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences, Vol. 12, Iss. 1, Jan, 2008, pp. 131-131 @2008 Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology & Life Sciences Art Feature for 2008: Electric Sheep Abstract: The cover designs are still images from the Electric Sheep,
a distributed screen-saver that harnesses idle computers into a render farm
with the purpose of animating and evolving artificial life-forms. The votes
of the audience of 50,000 users form the basis for the fitness function for
a genetic algorithm on a space of abstract animations, each known as a "sheep".
Users also may design sheep by hand for inclusion in the gene pool, so crowd-sourcing,
or intelligent design, collaborates and competes with evolution. The images were
drawn with the Fractal Flame algorithm, a generalization and refinement of
Iterated Function Systems. Essentially the images are interference patterns
between groups of nonlinear geometric transformations of the plane. The hundreds
of floating-point parameters of these transformations comprise the genome of each
sheep. This nonlinear map from genome to image defines a visual language, whose
search and incantation brings the machine to life. Keywords: cover art |