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| The front door. |
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| Good new quicktime sample. Short old quicktimes: 1700, 2507b. |
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| Five page conceptual explanation and ten page academic/technical paper | |
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| Archive of a previous generation of sheep, each with full-screen image and extended family tree. Archive of all generations. |
All the software is open source and users may participate in the network freely and anonymously. Anyone can download and install it. When their computer is idle and goes to sleep, the sheep animations appear, and in parallel the computer goes to work creating new sheep and sharing its results with all other users.
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.
I believe the free flow of code is an increasingly important social and artistic force. The proliferation of powerful computers with high-bandwidth network connections forms the substrate of an expanding universe. The electric sheep and we their shepherds are colonizing this new frontier.
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| Video documentary in MPEG-4 format, and an older streaming version in cinepak. |
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| High resolution music video in MEPG-4 format. |
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| Most touching email from a user. |
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| Apophysis the genetic design GUI. |
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| The FAQ, wiki, and hires stills. | |
Number of unique IP addresses hitting the sheep server per day: 30,000.
Most sheep data delivered in a single day: 2 terabytes (thanks to the CoralCDN P2P network)
