Visual Math Institute

Lexicon of Electric Sheep Studies

• a "fractal flame" is a 2D fractal colored as a histogram
• an "electric sheep" is an MPEG movie generated from a fractal flame by altering the color lookup table in a loop
• a "client" is a screen saver running on someone's desktop
• there are thousands of clients
• users (people using a client) can vot for (using up-arrow) or against (using down-arrow) the currently playing sheep
• the "rating" of a sheep is derived from the number of votes it received from users [see rule]
• the "fractal dimension" of a sheep is the correlation dimension of its generating flame
• ditto the Lyaunov exponent
• the "sheepserver" or "render farm" keeps downloading new sheep to the clients
• keeps records of max ratings, dimensions, lyapounovs, and birthdates of sheep
• sheep die when pushed off the stack by higher ranking newcomers [see rule]