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The artist is an art-producing AI, who was compiled from source code that is open.

That suspiciously sounds like Electric Sheep?

At last I, too, can dream of electric sheep!

And toss an electric sheep on the rotisserie while you're at it.

The Electric Sheep.

Best. Screensaver. Ever.

Agreed. I stopped using it when I realized that the processor utilization when it was running raised my room temperature by 8 degrees.
I'd wake up in the middle of the night uncomfortably warm. Not cool.

The Electric Sheep.
Best. Screensaver. Ever.

This is sheer stupidity on the side of the PKD estate. If they would just shut up, they might be contacted by Google for some neat comarketing thing. But noooo.

Perhaps the Nexus One is inspired not by PKD but by the science of nexialism from General Semantics as explained by A. E. Van Vogt.
link 1 link 2

Here's a question. The Electric Sheep Screensaver is a distributed fractal movie calculation engine which is pretty cool and the name comes from PKD's title "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" (the alternate title of Bladerunner IIRC). So if they tried to make money at it would the esteemed, stupid estate try to sue them too? If a literary work produces strong memes that become part of mainstream culture, which seems to be one of the goals of a writer in general, then is it ethical for the writer to try to control how people use that meme?

My impression (without reading TFA) is the estate wants a judicial finding that Google is trying to associate their product with a work of PKD's and reap some extra cash through that association. The association might be true but the reference is so obscure, and Google makes no attempt to mention PKD. The word used of itself is still in the realm of mainstream language and there are many other science fiction (and other) usages of "android" and "nexus". The estate hears everything through a filter of being a PKD expert but it is not conclusive that Google was taking advantage of them.

Next question: If the branding person at Google admits the android and nexus names were homages to PKD, then is the estate justified in suing? This is the main legal question. Unless Google tries to leverage it by use of additional imagery or text from PKD works, such that the use of the name is not an homage but a hook into the creative asset of the estate, I think not. But I'm not a lawyer. I think Google could get away with it if they stop picking PKD words to use as product names in the future.

As for the screensaver, I have no idea what the answer is. It's free but what about T-shirts? (the ones they sell don't say "electric sheep").
Actually it is neat that they call individual fractals "sheep" too. At this point I think we are talking about the culture taking possession of a meme and the original author is no longer involved with it. (i.e. you could make a t-shirt that says "Get Sheep" on it, I'd expect).

What tells you Wolfram isn't logging all searches and archiving them for three months? This would be enough to, say, make it dangerous to feature search results or screenshots in whatever Wolfram doesn't like, say in critical reviews. Unless there's some strict legislation/ruling that limits these perversions, I can easily see how this kind of argument might help intimidate people and blackmail them into license fees.

The Electric Sheep screen saver (awesome, BTW) auto-GPLs all images it produces. Has anyone thought about whether that is enforceable by law?

This is scary shit and requires attention.

They saw it in a movie. If they'd seen his screen saver he would have been arrested for Hacking the Gibson

boring! try Electric Sheep instead...

Well, it's GPL, so it certainly is possible. Imagine your Android Dream phone in sleep mode generating Electric Sheep. That's as close as it gets :)

When not running it's purpose built program, let it run Electric Sheep! (The idea being that the cluster is "sleeping")

http://www.electricsheep.org/

Have something displaying one of these or others you find.

From the /. article just before this one.
http://vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/~ogawa/codeswarm/

Xaos does autozoom and continually refreshes.
http://wmi.math.u-szeged.hu/xaos/doku.php

I like electric sheep
http://www.electricsheep.org/

Galaxy simulator
http://kornelix.squarespace.com/galaxy/

Posters are boring, if they don't have a chip embedded in them why bother? This is a question on slashdot and people don't come up with truly geeky solutions, what's up with people!

• Maybe some electric sheep screen savers running
• or take a page from any blackhat convention and display a running tally of what webpages are being surfed on the local wifi you're sniffing.
• Perhaps a scrolling display of passwords (Not telling the sites or the usernames, just passwords).
• Have a hidden webcam and a matching webcam/screen elsewhere on campus, instant 2 way
• Fake 'windows' of wrong seasons. I'd like to walk down a hallway in summer and see snow flying

Find a projector or a big LCD and connect it to a computer running Electric Sheep. Bonus points for wiring up a pair of "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" buttons next to it. Electric Sheep is a "collaborative screen saver." When the machine is idle and the screen saver kicks in, it downloads and displays cool fractal animations known as the "sheep." At the same time it is rendering frames for a new sheep and uploading them to the sheep server. When you see an interesting sheep, you can press "thumbs up" (up-arrow) if you like it or down if you don't. The sheep server uses the ratings when selecting sheep as inputs to a genetic algorithm for creating a new generation of sheep.

It's open source and been around for a while. I believe there is an installation at the Googleplex and it has been shown at the NYC MOMA.

I prefer Electric Sheep.

Coolest screensaver ever. In the ~4 years since I first downloaded it, I've run it at work, on my laptop... always get positive comments.

http://www.electricsheep.org/

Try Apophysis-J and Electric Sheep for getting kids into math and evolution through fun imagery.

As humor is often just a funny way of being serious, I don't think it's too soon for jokes.

Perhaps we should all use one of the many chaos generators out there for a few minutes as a way to salute his work? What is the best chaos program out there nowadays - I haven't used one since fractint ages ago. Well I did install the electric sheep screen saver which is very nice eye candy, but I want to see some particles circling around a lorenz attractor.

The images described in the summary (which are not really representative of most of the stuff in the gallery, just Fields's stuff) are generally known as iterated function systems, and perhaps belong to the subset known as fractal flames. The description is fairly accurate, but the images he has made are rather unimpressive compared to ones I've seen (and made myself). Probably the best known example of a fractal flame program is Electric Sheep. However, another good program for making fractal flames is called Apophysis (regretfully, it's Windows only, but does work fairly well under Wine). I've been working with Apophysis for about 3 years now, and trust me, there's a lot of more artistic stuff out there that uses fractal flames. Even some of the stuff on Wikimedia Commons is better than his stuff.

Coincidentally, my captcha was "artful".

If you're interested in pretty, shiny, mathematical things that you can run on Linux, check out:
  - electricsheep: animated fractal flames: http://www.electricsheep.org/ (I highly recommend running this as your screensaver, though it takes a bit for the first sheep to download)
  - Jenn: pretty, shiny, blue(?) polytopes, rendered on your computer: http://www.math.cmu.edu/~fho/jenn/

Anyone have any others?

Actually no. I remember a time long ago when there was tons of free software out there you could trust. I'm not talking about the open-source stuff (which I generally still trust when it's from SF.net or freshmeat), but demos, freeware utilities, shareware games, freeware episodes, etc.

There was a ton of free stuff out there without spyware, adware, or malware of any sort. Yes, you could get free screensavers (though many sucked). You could get free games (though most were demos). Nowadays, I see lots of things that look useful, but I just can't trust them to be *safe*.

There still is some safe free (non-os) software out there though, such as:

Skype talk to other computers, call phones in N. America for free?! Would you have trusted it
Screensavers and more Screensavers
Compression utilities

and more

The problem is that unless you have a lot of references on the software (and sometimes even then) you just can't trust them to be clean nowadays. The above are some ones that I do trust, but it's sad that I have to second-guess most things that seem free nowadays because there are too many scams and pieces of crapware out there.

The Electric Sheep server uses BitTorrent to distribute results of aesthetic evolution. Get the torrents of the RSS feed of torrents here. It's currently delivering about 150GB daily by torrent.

Cost? It's free, and one of the trippiest screensavers I've ever seen.
http://electricsheep.org/

I'm thinking that this type of thing should be good for screensavers and other hacks. I'd like to see Electric Sheep (http://electricsheep.org/)run entirely on the GPU.

Something I just found the other day: Electric Sheep, a screensaver and distributed animated art generator.

I hope this gets incorporated into the next version of the ElecticSheep p2p distributed screensaver...

try this for something with more substance:
Electric Sheep.

This is actually one thing most open-source lacks, unfortunately. Nobody seems to be interested in trying out new ideas.

I've been following Bowie Poag and the stuff he has been making recently. He has a bunch of idea he talked about for years, but now actually has the code to back it up with. He is the only guy I know who does anything diffrent, well, beyond the guys working on ElectricSheep , that is. :D

Some of it is really cool.

I don't know if this project fits your idea of network aware, but there is electric sheep. In this screen saver, computer join a collaborative task to calculate the next fractal to display. I think there are Linux, BSD and Mac OS X ports.

Now this is the new official site, and the only place I can find that has a source download.

You can find even more projects here. And they're ordered in categories, including science, mathematics, puzzles and even art (I really like the Electric Sheep Project).

Bottomquark has reviewed a number of projects.

And here is a community site of people participating in such projects.

It's been my screensaver of choice ever since the OSX version became stable.

better yet run electric sheep, the distributed screen saver that evolves fractal life forms (it's pretty!).

This one is called "electricsheep" and uses a distributed approach to preventing burn-in of your monitors. Looks pretty cool.

It's called electricsheep - a distributed screensaver.

Electric sheep is an internet server and xscreensaver module that displays mpeg video of an animated fractal flame. In the background it contributes render cycles to the next animation. Periodically it uploads completed frames to the server, where they are compressed for distribution to all clients.

So maybe having a secondary board to run your screensaver off of isn't that far off :)