What is Digg?62 Comments
- WomunOfColour, on 10/12/2007, -3/+20I had Electric Sheep as my screensaver for a while, but then I realized it was very distracting and lowered my productivity. You can vote up or vote down 'sheep' by pressing the up or down button, respectively. Everyone's votes work as a sort of natural selection, weeding out the bad sheep and propagating the good ones. There are also random mutations, so the sheep keep evolving into more beautiful fractals. It's like a giant neural network.
- senfo, on 10/12/2007, -3/+17@weprin
I think you might be on to something. Somebody should invent a social networking website that lets its its members digg or bury stories posted by other members of the site. Why hasn't anybody thought of this before!!? - weprin, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15
- Ryosen, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14@dshPls
Really? Try programming them sometime. And I'm not referring to Mandelbrots and Julians, either. Try some procedural texturing and cloud generation, both of which draw on fractals, or fire, smoke and land formations. Then come back and tell us how it doesn't require any talent or creativity.
In the meantime, I'll be more than happy to help you out with the getting kicked in the balls part. - savingadvice, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14main page for screensaver info: http://www.electricsheep.org/
- Tordenflesk, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10Not really, It's just bunch of random 3d-rendering.
- ardenr, on 10/12/2007, -4/+11Haha, I wish I could see the look on your kid's face when he comes home from Kindergarted, and you tell him that.
Anyway, kids grow up, (most of them at least), so does this. Way to miss the point. - mtappenden, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10I saw a kid once
- PDubNYC, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Electric Sheep IS A SCREEN SAVER.
The thumbnails are just snapshots of the various designs it does.
But thanks for the history lesson - weprin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I think there is a lot of untapped potential here. Voting on the prettiest animation is only just one small use of this technique for using the collective inputs of thousands (potentially millions!) of people to maintain heuristics.
- DreKor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5They're not being smart at all. These computers, like all others, are just following their algorithms. The intelligence in this model comes from people voting these "sheep" up or down (a la digg). If people like something that the computer has made then the computer keeps doing that. If people dislike it, then they tell the computer to change a variable and resubmit the "sheep" for approval.
- gwinerreniwg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I had problems with it sucking up all of my home-network's bandwidth when one of the PCs wasin screen saver mode. After a few weeks of weird performance issues, I finally narrowed it down to Electric Sheep as the culprit. As cool as the "sheep" look, I've uninstalled for this reason.
- mrsaturn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4@dhsPls
Fractals are hardly what "went wrong" with DeviantArt--at least they can be aesthetically pleasing. On the other hand, the huge influx of amateur anime, furry, and inflation (search for it) "art" much earlier in devart's history are what I would largely blame for its downfall. Then again, I've seen devart assaulted by a variety of artistically questionable scourges and trends over the years. - WarpFox, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4electric sheep is defidently a screensaver. although I constantly hear people using incorrect terminoligy like "my internet provider? i use internet explorer." or "can you download that to a disk for me?" I dont think this was the case in this instance :)
- aelias, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Wish the app ran in Hi-Res. :(
Bonus points for using bit torrent as a distribution model for the algorithm.
I've been running this for months, and am continually pleased with what it spits out.
It's constrained evolution mixed with democracy. They should try this in Washington. - kaniz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3This is a great screen saver, been running it for a long time now. The only problem is that it can become a bit distracting at times. There has been a few times I've been watching TV or a Movie and caught a glimpse of my screen in the distance and ended up spacing out on the screen saver for a few mins and ignoring whatever I was watching before.
I had quite a few gigs worth of the sheep downloaded, so there were lots of really smooth transitions / etc between loops and didn't see the same things repeated too often. - xmetal2001, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3If you are referring to electric sheep, it IS a screen saver. Check out the whole site.
- tikitechi, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Good examples too. No one knows the word upload.
Another good one is I am always being asked to "download the latest version of office to my CPU"
CPU and PC seem to be interchangable to people, even when I subtly correct them by then referring to the PC as a PC, they keep using CPU. We have quite a few people who dont understand that the monitor and the PC are two different things. As in "Is your pc on?" :)
Im sure we could all go on and on about this and write a book
ANyway, I know its a screensaver, and a good one. Just musing on silliness that the story made me think of. - doctorcaligari, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@tikitechi
Alot of people at my job call the computer a "modem". I get calls like "my modem won't take my password" while I sit there and try to figure out what they are talking about. - fac51, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Agreed, I have Electric Sheep on all of my PC's and it's fantastic.
Some of the designs are truly beautiful to watch and as they change over time and the 'sheep ' come and go you will never get bored of any one screensaver.
Also the fact you can use the up and down keys to vote on each saver (if you wish) means that bad looking designs go away quicker. all in all a big thumbs up from me! - Osiriscky3, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2soon my child soon...
- adragontattoo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2awesome program, I have been using it for a few years on different PC's. A few of the teachers at my job use it to teach with.
- codemonkey2841, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3It isn't technically art in the classical sense of the word, they are fractals which are simply mathematically generated patterns.
- mrsaturn, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3@Ryosen
dhsPLS wasn't talking about programming fractal generators, he was talking about using them to produce art. All you have to do is tweak the variables until you come up with something that looks cool. It's a big shortcut to producing abstract art. Then again I wouldn't say that Pollock's work was technically challenging to make either, but it is still highly regarded by many.
That said, Photoshop makes it trivial to perform hundreds of different techniques that would otherwise be extremely difficult or impossible to do by hand. Is that cheating? Does it matter? Are the visual aesthetics not the same regardless of the methods employed? - SOAB, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Gezzzzzzz it's back... :-/
It's been here, done that.
http://digg.com/software/PCs_Dream_Of_Electric_Sheep
Still cool though. - BarriedaleNick, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Other download link if you are interested..
http://downloads.megagames.com/screensavers/electricsheep-2.6.6.exe - TheMadCow, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4I wish we could vote to bury all the pissing whiners who have nothing better to do but bitch and whine about this thing or that thing not being what they want...
Digg is like some horrible anti-crack, you have to read comments - but you want to strangle the sh*t out of 90% of the assclowns posting. - Quadduc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The stills are nothing to the animations. The animated "sheep" are truly fascinating. My only complaint is that the animations are a bit noisy (a result of the rendering method). Noise adds unnecessary complexity to the data, which results in less efficient video compression. If the animations are rendered with more iterations (requiring more CPU time), they will have less noise. That's not a reason not to try it out, though. I will keep this one as my choice of screensaver for some time.
- MeatBiProduct, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1programming itself is considered a fine art - look it up.
- akira117, on 10/12/2007, -5/+6Ditto this is very old, but deserves the fount page since it is such a good program.
- spriggig, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Be sure to set the hard drive cache size to something other than "unlimited", this thing will quickly inhabit 10's of GBs.
- Quadduc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I laughed.
- invader, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2speechless? c'mon.. they're not _that_ """Amazing"""...
- Tordenflesk, on 10/12/2007, -10/+11Ah, reminds me of when i first discovered digg
(Hint: this is ooold) - Osiriscky3, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1actually it uses Bit Torrent which if you had looked in the preferences once you would have noticed that you could change the programs bandwidth usage. Maybe uninstall was more up your alley.
- mikesbaker, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2i was doing a lot of dvd creation and of course had to leave the computer running for a long time. the program that I used burned into my LCD. Thankfully after a couple of days it went away but for a while I thought that I would have to buy a new monitor.
- underrun, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Try clicking on Google cache or a download mirror. It might be a better use of your time.
http://www.majorgeeks.com/electric_sheep_d4547.html - munkyxtc, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1yeah, it's been sitting here just spinning its wheels for over 5 mins
- Aurell, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I've been part of the electric sheep project and I find it an amazing one. I am not there for the mathematical part because I know little of maths. I am not there for computer design either because I am not designer. I am a PhD philosopher and my main research area is aesthetics. I am interested in this project precisely for its artistic value. First of all we have to consider that art in the wide sense is the development of a technique and its products. When we talk about Art in capital letters I agree with what was said regarding photograph. While most just snap a picture, there are real artists that have the talent to match eye and soul through a lens.
And while many are talented artists, others try and learn through it. That is my case. I learn a bit of math, a bit of design, lots of interactive project (it is exciting to colaborate with people from many disciplines worldwide in a project only for the sake of it. I call that art!) and give my cent in aesthetical approach. - boomwad, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1how long does it take for the first "sheep" to download? I've been waiting quite some time...?
- Osiriscky3, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1STFU NOOB
- spotspot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0the sheep creator's (my) response to the above comments:
http://draves.org/blog/archives/000459.html - IzeasGT, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1This is what, the third time I've recommended Out of Control on Digg?
Good stuff. Read it. http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/contents.php - kLacK, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Now if only the screen saver would change my resolution to the match the resolution of the video it wouldn't look so grainy!
- shmatt, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2To an extent.
Some of these are nice, but I still think a fractal is a fractal. It's a really cool way to express equations, it is not in any way an expression outside of mathematics. If want to call it art, you can, but I define art as human expression, not a machine doing calculations
To each their own, I havent thumbed anyone down for liking this stuff. - underrun, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2It's nnnnew to me so digg.
I evaluated the fact that the site has existed for a while but realized quickly that I didn't care. - trp642, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2http://duggmirror.com/design/300_Amazing_Computer_Generated_Images_and_can_become_your_screensaver/
- goltoof, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1Sounds interesting, i could use a new wallpaper. But the site won't load for me :(
- OrlyonokEaglet, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2this is terrible, digg should show different front page stories to different visitors or something, every link is dead slow
- ez4me2c3d, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1Dugmirror.com only shows thumbnails, not really a practical way to preserve this type of art.
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