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scottdraves
flam3
Shell2016–2020
scottdraves / flam3

flam3

the original fractal flame renderer and genetic language

Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
2Distinct people
3Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
448GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

the original fractal flame renderer and genetic language

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year3 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-09-12 15:41:08 UTC to 2020-02-16 04:34:17 UTC.

012016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

3 sources
DonHopkins·Feb 16, 2020
Another mesmerizing screen saver is Electric Sheep, which just keeps getting better and better over time, as it evolves in response to user's feedback: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17861723 Electric Sheep is generative crowdsourced evolutionary art that enables viewers to vote for their favorite "sheep" animations to send them off to the pasture to breed with other user's favorites with genetic cross-over and mutation. So it just gets better and better, in response to what people actually enjoy! https://electricsheep.org/#/about http://scottdraves.com/sheep.html http://scottdraves.com/flame.html http://flam3.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050425102606/http://flam3.com/... Once I fell asleep while watching Star Trek Deep Space 9 on Netflix, and then half woke up after the Electric Sheep screen saver has kicked back in but I did
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n't realize it, so my brain struggled for several minutes trying to make sense of the never-ending wormhole sequence that I though was an out-of-control shuttlecraft lost in space! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15668253 I have spent so many hours staring at Electric Sheep, thinking and wondering about how it works, that I finally looked it up, and found the papers about it! It took less time to read the papers than it took to stare at the screen all day tripping out and wondering, but I like to do both. The Flame Algorithm Flames are algorithmically generated images and animations. The software was originally written in 1992 and released as open source, aka free software. Over the years it has been greatly expanded, and is now widely used to create art and special effects. The shape and color of each image is specified by a long string of numbers - a genetic code of sorts. http://flam3.com/ The Fractal Flame Algorithm https://web.archive.org/web/20050425102606/http://flam3.com/... Evolution and Collective Intelligence of the Electric Sheep http://draves.org/aoae07/draves-aoae07.pdf The Electric Sheep and their Dreams in High Fidelity http://draves.org/npar06/npar06draves.pdf infinite evolving crowdsourced artwork https://github.com/scottdraves/electricsheep Copyright Spotworks LLC GPL2 Licensed see https://github.com/scottdraves/electricsheep/blob/master/cli... 2015.05 moved from code.google.com repo 2011.01.30 based on revision 1546 on sf.net The Electric Sheep is a cyborg mind. It harnesses the collective intelligence of 450,000 computers and people to create abstract art with mathematics and Darwinian evolution. The result is seamless, organic, and infinite. See also http://electricsheep.org and http://scottdraves.com . The rendering engine is a separate project at https://github.com/scottdraves/flam3
In Aggressively Stupid: The Story Behind After Dark (2007)
DonHopkins·Nov 10, 2017
I have spent so many hours staring at Electric Sheep, thinking and wondering about how it works, that I finally looked it up, and found the papers about it! It took less time to read the papers than it took to stare at the screen all day tripping out and wondering, but I like to do both. The Flame Algorithm Flames are algorithmically generated images and animations. The software was originally written in 1992 and released as open source, aka free software. Over the years it has been greatly expanded, and is now widely used to create art and special effects. The shape and color of each image is specified by a long string of numbers - a genetic code of sorts. http://flam3.com/ The Fractal Flame Algorithm http://flam3.com/flame.pdf Evolution and Collective Intelligence of the Electric Sheep http://draves.org/aoae07/draves-aoae07.pdf The Elec
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tric Sheep and their Dreams in High Fidelity http://draves.org/npar06/npar06draves.pdf infinite evolving crowdsourced artwork https://github.com/scottdraves/electricsheep Copyright Spotworks LLC GPL2 Licensed see https://github.com/scottdraves/electricsheep/blob/master/cli... 2015.05 moved from code.google.com repo 2011.01.30 based on revision 1546 on sf.net The Electric Sheep is a cyborg mind. It harnesses the collective intelligence of 450,000 computers and people to create abstract art with mathematics and Darwinian evolution. The result is seamless, organic, and infinite. See also http://electricsheep.org and http://scottdraves.com . The rendering engine is a separate project at https://github.com/scottdraves/flam3
In Electric Sheep on Ubuntu Linux 17.10
kimburgess·Sep 12, 2016
Scott Draves has been running a distributed generative art project since last century (1999): http://electricsheep.org/ or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Sheep for a quick summary. As well as using a pretty interesting fractal algorithm for the content it uses a genetic algorithm for filtering of results and progression. He posts everything to GitHub too if you're interested: https://github.com/scottdraves/electricsheep https://github.com/scottdraves/flam3
In On Generative Algorithms

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