第70篇译稿。机器人梦见电子羊可不再是科幻小说了，一起来看看数千台沉睡中的电脑梦见了什么样的电子羊吧~~
美妙绝伦的电子羊
发布： 16:29:38
写在前面：电子羊源自科幻小说《机器人会梦见电子羊吗？》，当然也许其电影版《银翼杀手》更为出名。（ORZ，其实我都没有看过~~！）这里的电子羊，其实就是字面的意思，但是，如果电脑也会做梦，那么，算不算有了智能呢？另外，这个程序还真是GEEK们的最爱啊，很赞啊。网上不同的244代完全是不一样的美丽，你自己也可以试试。地址嘛，嘿嘿，认真看文章就知道啦~~~
If Hal was somehow able to dream after Dr. Chandra shut it down in Arthur C. Clarke’s “2010,” the results may have looked something like Electric Sheep. Not at all resembling the sheep we might conjure as we fall asleep, these beautiful digital images spring to life when a computer drifts off to its screensaver slumber. But they’re more than just a randomized graphics program. Each Electric Sheep is the collective creation of thousands of computers around the world. The Electric Sheep shown in the pictures and videos below are a striking artistic demonstration of the creative powers of the Internet and open source sharing. By voting on sheep they find visually appealing, humans cause these virtual creatures to compete, procreate and evolve. What strange and beautiful results may arise as these visual creations become ever better examples of digital lifeforms? “钱德拉博士，我会睡着吗？” “我不知道。” 如果克拉克《2010》中的哈尔被钱德拉博士关掉后莫名其妙地做梦了，结果就有点像电子羊了。和我们睡着了梦见绵羊不同，当电脑切换到屏保程序时那些美丽的电子图案就充满了生机。但是它们绝不是随机图案程序。每一个电子羊都是世界上数千台电脑集体“智慧”的结晶。下面图片和视频中的电子羊很好的展示了互联网和开源共享的艺术创造力。通过筛选投票选出视觉上好看的，人为地引导这些视觉产物竞争、繁殖和进化。这些好看的电子羊最终会生成怎样奇怪美丽的图案呢？
The sheep are the creation of Scott Draves, and they’re the conceptual descendants of one of Draves’ earlier creations called Flames. While getting his PhD in computer science at Carnegie Melon he wrote an graphics algorithm to create fractal patterns by treating each pixel as a variable and by introducing parameters that numbered in the thousands. The original flames were created using plugins for Adobe Photoshop and AfterEffects. He published the algorithm online and, well, the Flames spread. Today the Flame algorithm is installed on millions of computers worldwide. 这些电子羊是斯考特的创造的，它们都是斯考特早期创造的“火焰”的后代。在卡内基指导下斯考特获得了电脑科学的博士学位，他通过将每个像素看做一个变量，并引入成千上万个参数写了一个图形算法来创造分形图形，初代的“火焰”仅使用&了Adobe Photoshop 和 AfterEffects的插件。他将算法公开在网上，从此“火焰”就开始繁衍了。今天世界数百万电脑上安装了用“火焰”算法制作的屏保。
某用户甲创造的电子羊 But the Flames were static and Draves wanted to animate them. Inspired by the then new SETI@home project that used the Internet to tap the computing power of millions of idle home computers, Draves utilized a similar approach to be able to carry out the demanding computations required to animate his Flames. 初代“火焰”是稳定“遗传”的，斯考特想让它具有生命特征。受之后新起的SETI@home项目（译者注：SETI@home 是一项利用全球联网的计算机共同搜寻地外文明的科学实验计划，SETI@home程序在用户的个人计算机上，通常在屏幕保护模式下或以后台模式运行。它利用的是多余的处理器资源，不影响用户正常使用计算机。虽然项目没有发现外星文明的直接证据，但是是迄今为止最成功的分布式计算试验项目。）鼓舞，斯考特利用相似的方法让足够的电脑参与进来“激活”他的“火焰”。
用户乙创造的电子羊 As the number of people who downloaded the free screensaver grew, so did the number of frames able to be rendered on Draves’ server. The iterative algorithm was able to take the newly added pixel data and rearrange them in new ways, with new colors and motions. And that’s how Electronic Sheep were born. 当下载免费屏保的的人越来越多，斯考特伺服器上不同“火焰”的数目也越来越多。迭代算法使其有能力加入新的像素数据并用新的颜色和运动方式重新排列。这就是所谓的电子羊诞生记。 A GUI app called Apophysis that makes it easier for users to create sheep replaced the original Flame plugins. Now thousands of sheep are being created by thousands of people with an artistic bent. The current version gives each sheep about ten seconds of life before another sheep begins swirling in its place. If you think of the sheep as virtual lifeforms – as Draves does – you can – also like Draves – think of each sheep’s algorithm as its genetic code. As he wrote for the computer graphics interest group SIGGRAPH, new animations “have a chance to contribute their genes to the reproductive system of the Electric Sheep, which was already based on Darwinian evolution with mutation and crossover.” 一个叫做Apophysis的GUI（Graphical User Interface，即图形用户界面）应用使得用户创造电子羊更新初代“火焰”大为方便。目前已有数千只电子羊被数千人艺术性创造出来了。目前的版本使得每只电子羊在被另一只取代前有十秒钟的寿命。如果你和斯考特一样将这些电子羊看做生命，你也可以和斯考特一样认为每只电子羊的算法就是它的遗传密码。他在写给电脑图形兴趣团体SIGGRAPH的心中调皮地说“基于达尔文的进化论，基因重组和变异使得人们有机会将自己的基因加入电子羊的生殖系统哦。” Here’s the first of several videos to give you a look at what these beautiful “lifeforms” look like. 下面是一系列视频让人们看看这种美丽的“生命”的模样。 （译者注：因为国内看不到，这里只给链接：
） But every good Darwinian system needs a ‘Survival of The Fittest’ force. That’s where the users come in. As users watch the sheep morph on their computer screen they can vote for the ones they like and vote down the ones they don’t. In this example of art imitating life, the fittest sheep – that is, the most popular ones – get to “mate” and contribute their virtual DNA to produce unique offspring. Draves calls it a “process of death and rebirth.” You can download the sheep program here to try your hand at some artificial natural selection. 但是每个完美的达尔文系统遵循”适者生存”。这就是用户的挑选作用了。当用户看着他们电脑上变化的电子羊时他们可以进行投票。在这个模范生命的艺术例子中，最“适者”就是最受欢迎的，可以“交配”并将它们的“DNA”遗传给自己独特的后代。斯考特将这称为一个“死亡和重生的过程”。你可以在下载电子羊程序并尝试自己进行下艺术上的自然选择。
用户丙创造的电子羊
Electric Sheep are not merely a very ingenious and labor-intensive way to make pretty screensavers, they’re part of Draves’ open source philosophy. “I think we as a society should support free information to a much greater extent than we do,” he said in an interview with The Creators Project. “My artwork is a manifestation of this philosophy.”
电子羊不仅仅是一种独创的集中创造漂亮屏保的方法，它们还是斯考特“开源”哲学的体现。“我认为我们作为社会的一份子应该向给多的人提供免费的信息而不只是汲取。”他在接受“创造者项目”采访时说，“我的艺术品就是我人生哲学的体现。” Creative Commons, the online affiliate that provides licensing to open share software including Electric Sheep, share Draves’ philosophy. They believe that only through universal access to research, education, and culture can the full power of the Internet be realized. They envision a day when the Internet is used to harness the creative input of thousands or millions of users to not only make better sheep, but improve our lives through an evolutionary honing of knowledge. 创意共享（Creative Commons）是网上提供开源共享软件（包括电子羊）的平台，很好的体现了斯考特的哲学精神。他们相信只有通过全球化的研究、教育和文化才能发挥互联网最大的力量。他们想象着有一天互联网能接受数千或者数百万用户个性化的创造，不仅仅是创造更好的电子羊，也能让知识进化提升人类的生活。 But just as the products of biological evolution aren’t always the most straightforward solutions (see David Linden’s “The Accidental Mind” for a healthy dose of humility about our brains’ hodgepodge architecture), Draves is often not a big fan of what his sheep-creating collective breathes life into. What he refers to as the “Las Vegas Effect” lead people to choose sheep that are flashy, have lots of bright colors and move fast. This prompted Draves to sift through the sheep himself and pull out the ones he finds aesthetically pleasing. He’s compiled them into limited edition videos that he sells to help fund the not-yet-profitable Electric Sheep. 但是正如生物进化的产物并不总是最直接的（参见大卫·林登的《进化的大脑:赋予我们爱情、记忆和美梦》，看看谦卑对我们混乱大脑的作用），斯考特通常并不很在意电子羊对其生活的影响。他提到所谓“拉斯维加斯效应”导致人们选择光鲜的电子羊，它们颜色绚丽、移动迅速。这促使斯考特自己刷选电子羊并公布他认为具有美感的版本。他已经将它们编入视频，并卖出以获得资金支持，因为电子羊是非营利性质的。 The fact that sheep evolve on their own means Draves has satisfied his own impetus to explore whether or not computers can create something new, something greater than the sum of their input. “Genetic code,” “evolution,” “creation”…sounds like Draves just might have a touch of God complex. “That’s right,” he told The Creators Project when asked if he was playing God. “I’ve created a universe and the rules for this universe and then inside it sort of has a population that lives there.” He follows that by admitting he wanted to create virtual life, and that “it’s not clear how successful one can be. …Can computers think? Can a computer be creative?” 电子羊是按照它们自己的方式进化的，这使得斯考特对自己探索电脑能否创造一些新的，比输入简单相加更伟大的东西出来十分满意。“基因密码 ”、“进化”、“生物”等等听起来斯考特触到了上帝的存在。“是的。”当他接受“创造者项目”采访时被问及他是否扮演了上帝的角色时，他如是回答。“我已经创造了一个世界，以及世界的法则，然后它自己某种程度上有了生命。”接着他承认他想创造虚拟生命，“现在还不清楚如何成功实现……电脑会思考吗？电脑能成为创造者吗？” And then he starts to get metaphysical for real. 然后他开始将形而上学变成真实。 “…is humanity the only possible vehicle for what really amounts to a soul? …some people believe that all material matter follows the rules of physics, and if you can figure out what physics is, a computer can follow the rules and therefore you can simulate life in a computer. So it really becomes a profound question that we are, as a society, really just starting to struggle with.” “…人类是唯一可能的智慧生物吗？…一些人相信所有实物都遵循物理法则，如果你能指出什么是物理，电脑就能遵循这些法则，就可以在电脑上模拟生命。所以这实际上变成了一个意义深远的问题，即作为社会人的我们正开始面对的问题。” Right now, the Electric Sheep are still just screensavers, albeit evolving and unpredictable screensavers. But what limits are there to the kind of reiterative, informatics cross-breeding underlying their generation? What might be produced when the same process is applied to more functional outputs? What if we woke up one morning and our computers were doing things that we didn’t fully understand. 现在电子羊还只是屏保程序，虽然是进化中的不可预测的屏保。但是什么局限了它们一代代信息杂交存在某种反复或重复？当同样的进程需要更多功能的输出端时会发生什么呢？设想有一天早晨我们醒来，我们的电脑在做着我们完全无法理解的事情。 And so on. 诸如此类。 How that might play out is as unpredictable as the sheep. Until it happens, I suppose we’re left merely to wonder…and perhaps dream. 这样的后果就和电子羊一样不可预测。在它发生之前，我想我们除了想象，就只有，恩，做梦了。
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相关译文来自无觅插件
发表于： 02:28:39
“进化的大脑”似乎是通用译名，但其实不合原意。accidental mind，是“偶然的/机缘巧合的”大脑。读了这本书，就会知道我们的大脑是东拼西凑出来的，并为此感到应有的谦卑。
发表于： 02:31:12
sheep-creating collective是指创造电子羊的用户群体。软件的作者并不特别青睐他的用户群体赋之以生命的电子羊，觉得它们就像拉斯维加斯的街景一样太花哨。又，not-yet-profitable不是非营利，而是还不能赢利。
发表于： 02:32:21
a touch of God complex，一点点上帝情结。
发表于： 02:33:58
他开始认真地探讨形而上学（或意译为“哲学”）问题。
发表于： 02:35:15
只有人类才能承载那种可以称之为灵魂的东西吗？
发表于： 02:37:56
What might be produced when the same process is applied to more functional outputs?如果把同样的方法应用到更有用的产品上，又会什么样的成果呢？
发表于： 10:48:38
因为考虑到用这个译名方便查到中文本，便于阅读。您后面的建议是对的。
发表于： 14:54:17
跟《创.战纪》一样难以解释和接受。。。。
发表于： 21:36:00
您已经赞过此文了。we are only just begin翻议中文是什么
we are only just begin翻议中文是什么
09-07-24 &匿名提问
这个英语不标准，大概是“我们刚开始”
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我也认为这英语不标准意思是：我们才刚开始。这句话正确的应该是：we just begin. 就可以了。
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我们只不过刚刚开始
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we just begin我们刚开始
请登录后再发表评论!推荐到广播
85121 人聚集在这个小组
(習慣沉默)
(好名都让猪起了)
(旧巷子的猫耳朵)
(愛吃蘑菇的小香)
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