Albert's

Electric Sheep









Electric Sheep is a free open source software that randomly generates fractol images. You can see more images in their archive. My favorite generation is 165.

The name came from Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. "It is one of the defining science fiction works exploring the ethical dimensions of androids." If you have seen the movie "Blade Runner", that movie is loosely based on this famous book.

The images produced by the software is breath-taking. But the intriguing part is the Electric Sheep itself. The software takes 2 "parent" images, mate them, and produces offspring pictures. So if you like any particular 2 pictures in previous series, you place them together and see what might the combined vision result.


You can see one of my favorite image has 7 children. One seems to be red so I guess the father was red.

If you click on "stats" it has record of when the picture was "born", when it "dies", the time taken for "gestation" (picture formation), and more. You can choose to promote this series, then there is a higher likelyhood this picture will be mated again sometimes in the future. The higher rating picture also gets into "Best Archive", so people who wants to just see the prettiest picture can find those easier.

You can download the software yourself and mate your own images. The images you upload will be credited to you. The project is open source and free, there is a link for donation which is how the site operates. I recommend you to check out their home page and archive.

1 Comments:

At 2/26/2008 7:58 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thank you for your website. I found out about Fractal of the Day on Google Add Stuff, and wanted to view an official site. Your blog was listed number one on the search results for "fractal," just to let you know. I would never have known to look under "eletric sheep." The link to their site is exactly what I was looking for.

I first heard of fractals in grade school and thought it was an awesome idea. The only color I knew of then was green. Now, it's an artist's palette, for which I have great appreciation. So, to say the least, visiting the site has been quite a reunion with one of my childhood memories. Thanks again.

Canyon Lake, CA USA

 

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