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The Electric Sheep Screen-Saver: A Case Study in Aesthetic Evolution

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Applications of Evolutionary Computing (EvoWorkshops 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 3449))

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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 fractal animations. Users also may design sheep by hand for inclusion in the gene pool. This paper describes the system and its algorithms, and reports statistics from 11 weeks of operation. The data indicate that Electric Sheep functions more as an amplifier of its human collaborators’ creativity rather than as a traditional genetic algorithm that optimizes a fitness function.

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References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Spotworks, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Scott Draves

Authors
  1. Scott Draves
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany

    Franz Rothlauf

  2. Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, 76128, Karlsruhe, Germany

    JĂĽrgen Branke

  3. Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, Università di Parma,  

    Stefano Cagnoni

  4. School of Mathematical and Computer Science, Heriot-Watt University, EH14 8AS, Edinburgh, UK

    David Wolfe Corne

  5. Institute of Computer Science, University of Bremen, 28359, Bremen, Germany

    Rolf Drechsler

  6. Honda Research Institute Europe GmbH, Offenbach/Main, Germany

    Yaochu Jin

  7. CISUC, Department of Informatics Engineering, University of Coimbra, Polo II of the University of Coimbra, 3030, Coimbra, Portugal

    Penousal Machado

  8. ICIS, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Elena Marchiori

  9. Universidade de A Coruña, CP 15071, A Coruña, Spain

    Juan Romero

  10. School of Computing Sciences, University of East Anglia, UEA Norwich, NR4 7TJ, Norwich, UK

    George D. Smith

  11. Dipartimento di Automatica e Informatica, Politecnico di Torino, Italy

    Giovanni Squillero

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Draves, S. (2005). The Electric Sheep Screen-Saver: A Case Study in Aesthetic Evolution. In: Rothlauf, F., et al. Applications of Evolutionary Computing. EvoWorkshops 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3449. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-32003-6_46

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-32003-6_46

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-25396-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32003-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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