Electric Sheep

Back to evolving software and artificial life, this time it's electric sheep.  According to Wikipedia,

Electric Sheep is a distributed computing project for animating and evolving fractal flames, which are in turn distributed to the networked computers, which display them as a screensaver.

Note that electric sheep is a distributed computing project.  Other distributed projects include SETI@home, which searches for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence; Bitcoin, the most widely used alternative currency; and ClimatePrediction, a project to investigate and reduce uncertainties in climate modelling. In other words your computer becomes a member of a network for the purpose of extending the project's computational ability and/or information processing.

According to an article by Ryan Naraine in eWeek, Grid Computing Can Allow Security Threats, (2005).  (Sorry, it's a fairly old article, but the only one I could find that isn't a scientific paper and locked up tighter than ...)

Wait a minute.  The terminology has evolved: what we're looking at is cloud computing. And "cloud security"

is an evolving sub-domain of computer security, network security, and, more broadly, information security. --Wikipedia

Back to electric sheep.  There are many samples of what the screensavers look like at the electric sheep site and information about how to take part in the project.  Terms for using the application's output are on the remix and reuse page.  Here's a video showing electric sheep on an Ubuntu desktop, published at PinoyGeekdotOrg:

A note to the wise: don't install this application at work without checking with your network admin first.

-- Marge

Artificial life in virtual worlds

Interesting news from the Second Life front:  In an article titled "Student Creates Code Which Generates Second Life/OpenSim Avatars... Based on Simulated Genetics!" Wagner James Au reports on a project being developed by "the University of Western Sydney and the Federation of American Scientists." Here's the video that demonstrates the work:

Envirtech is the group doing this work and they call the project Artificial Life Lab. For background, see the Wikipedia article on artificial life (aka Alife); note that the article directs you to the talk page -- there are a number of "challenges" to the article.

Knowing that MIT has been working with artificial intelligence for a long time, on a hunch I looked to see what might be going on with respect to virtual worlds and found this page on Digital Humanities and this quote mid-page:

It used to be that we in English departments were fond of saying there was nothing outside of the text. Increasingly, though, texts take the form of worlds as much as words. Worlds are emerging as the consummate genre of the new century, whether it’s the virtual worlds of Second Life or World of Warcraft or the more specialized venues seen in high-end simulation and visualization environments. Virtual worlds will be to the new century what cinema was to the last one and the novel to the century before that.

As an aside, I also found the article "‘Artificial leaf’ moves closer to reality" at the MIT site.  It fits in with the artificial photosynthesis article of a few days ago.

I love it when things mesh together.


-- Marge