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Do Plants Practice Grid Computing?
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to Nature, plants appear to 'think' and seem to optimize their 'breathing' by conducting simple calculations through a distributed computing scheme. "David Peak and co-workers at Utah State University in Logan say that plants may regulate their uptake and loss of gases by 'distributed computation' -- a kind of information processing that involves communication between many interacting units." Nature adds this is similar to signals exchanged by ants to find the best source of food for an ant community. In their paper, the researchers added that their results were "consistent with the proposition that a plant solves its optimal gas exchange problem through an emergent, distributed computation performed by its leaves." This overview contains more details and references. It also includes a picture of the tiny pores on the surface of a cactus leaf, called stomata, which permit the plant to breathe when they're opened."
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of trees...
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
But they probably call it something else.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Now there's a way to mess with the forst pist people, post the stories in a random order on the page.
Was it Destination: Void or The Jesus Incident? I think it was the jesus incident. this is very reminiscent of that...
If one thinks of quantum computing as a kind of parallelism, then maybe so.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
With no centralized 'nervous system' it's almost a duh.
But don't think of it as "thinking" the individual cells act on instinct and survival
Error 407 - No creative sig found
...leaf nodes?
Or are they root nodes?
No wonder the damn weeds keep coming back so fast - they must be overclocked.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
I see the connection. Grid computing is vaporware and most plants need moist air to survive.
Could someone shed some light on how complex systems like this might have evolved? Especially with species that are dependant on each other... plant pollination for example. It would be extremely unlikely that bees and flowers would have mutated perfectly at the percise exact time in order to make this happen correctly.
Sometimes the creationists' theory doesn't seem too far off wack.
I saw the headline to this article "Do plants practice grid computing?" and I thought "AHA! I'll just jump in here, throw in a hillarious line about plants and computers and bingo, easy points."
Imagine my dismay when I saw that every single message on the thread is a hillarious comment about plants and their computing abilities! Ho ho ho
You people certainly make it difficult for a person to be an edgy counter-culture warrior, disarming the system with humour.
Just go back to bashing Microsoft and leave the comedy to me.
apt-get install deathstar && deathstar alderaan && echo "You're far too trusting"
the ultimate geek ability: find a scifi computer game reference to every Nature story. today: Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri.
(k' fungii are not exactly plants, but who cares...)
[i have an opinion and i am not afraid to use it]
It's not really a thought process, but more of an automated response. Kinda like a reflex. It doesn't suprise me that plants can communicate, after all, they have had longer to evolve than animals ;). There all sorts of things like this in biology that we have yet to discover.
Mewyn Dy'ner
What has greater logical processing skills?
a) Bush
b) some plants
c) mushrooms
d) the dung from whence it came
How come this story and the last one have so few comments?
What are the fruitful implications for pot growers, I wonder?
C|N>K
My folks used to call me little daikon head when I was younger. I used to think that was kind of degrading since the root of the plant was the edible part. I suppose I should take it as a complement now that it's been shown the top part actually may have calculating powers.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
It also includes a picture of the tiny pores on the surface of a cactus leaf, called stomata. . .
Unless the cactus looks like this, then they're called stigmata
(And no, that's no goatse link and I didn't draw it myself -- found it by googling for images of "cactus cross". Once again the unholy alliance of Google and freakish AOLers is there to support an awful pun.)
Don't tell the hippies; then what will they eat and wear? Who wants to see a bunch of filthy, scrawny, naked hippies running about telling everyone to eat dirt.
So, plant behavior kinda sorta looks similar to what a distributed computing system might look like, therefore plants are distributed computers?
"I saw a picture of a Mars rock that looked like a human face, therefore there are people living on Mars."
Or is this just a buzzword-filled way to say the obvious: there is no central brain in a tree; each leaf controls it's own pores and uses chemical signals from surrounding pores and leaves for help. We already knew that trees "communicate" with each other on when it is time to start changing color. Perhaps I should write up that old news and drop in some buzzwords. I can title it "Trees form Beowulf Clusters to incentivize the diversification and downsizing of foliage."
While we don't necessarily use different parts of the brain for *all* activity, there is certainly redundancy and distribution. Some parts work in conjunction with others, and if certain parts are removed or damaged, the distribution (and therefore redundancy) are able to perform the same functions. I didn't RTFA, but I will now! :)
A blog like any other.
Apparently, there's Unix code in these plants information processing systems.
Mod parent up!
The statistics of the size of these patches, and of the waiting times between the appearance of successive patches, are the same as those for a model of cellular automata: The individual leaf stomata [...] respond to what their neighbouring stomata are doing.
Or, in one word: catuses play the game of life.
This post was compiled with `% gec -O`. email me if you need the sources
We already knew that. The plants are part of the system that was built by the mice for the purpose of answering the question of life, the universe, and everything.
Ah yes... Utah State University in Logan. Home of some of the planets scariest biological research experiments. I was a grad student there in the mid 90's and had marines pointing assault rifles in my face 3 times because I took a wrong turn in the (LAB)ryinth. MARINES... with VERY large guns, not the rent a cop security gaurds like some of the other TS labs I've contracted in. The place is sort of like Black Mesa in the Half-Life games. I am suprised not many people know about it... and I hope it stays that way.
Bacterial colonies will also exhibit a "thinking" behaviour. Individual bacter will respond to stimuli one of two ways: motility toward the stimulus, or a kind of rolling motion which will modify thier direction to move away from the stimulus. This individual action of "thought" utilized by an unfathomable quantity of generations of bacteria has proven its worth. Is this thinking? Maybe, maybe not. This isn't philosophy class... The point is that all forms of life can be divided into discreet units that display often surprising emergent properties when allowed to interact. Cooperation and communication between individual cells (and components of cells) in the human body is the reason you can sit here and read this post...
If this story were published in ___ it would be titled ___
1790: Plants and their Hidden Telegraphs!
1870: Do Plants Talk to Each Other on Leafy Telephones?
1962: Plants and their Invisible DEW Lines
1990: Plants have their Own Secret Internet!
2004: Do Plants Practice Grid Computing?
2010: Do Plants Engage in CyberBiphrenistic Nano-Spatulation?
...SCO will be sueing farmers?
Are they really sure it should be called a "distributed computing network" and not just a multi-element feedback network?
While we may be able to identify the various metabolic pathways and processes in all cells, to call them "computers" implies a certain amount of discreteness either in process pathways or elements making it up. Sure, at some level there is quantization (i.e., cellular), but one cannot identify one part and say, "this is the atmospheric pressure sensor", and "this is the hygrometric sensor".
Is the feedback system in our bodies that regulates heartrate, blood pressure and respiration a discrete computing process easily identified into its component parts? No, it's a bunch of feedback loops at various levels with a few simple inputs that produces a complex state that manifests in a few simple responses.
...from the naive/evil scientist in Christian Nyby's 1951 The Thing.
Other important points:
Don't sleep with an electric blanket near a frozen alien.
Vegetables can be preserved by freezing, but not by cooking.
When isolated in an artic research station, don't feed blood-eating vegetables your reserve plasma supply.
Shouldn't that be, computers seem to 'think' like plants
The Cactus Pore pic makes funky wallpaper if you set it as a tile.
ls
is give peas a chance.
(uh. that hurt.)
No longer can calling someone "a vegtable" imply total lack of brain activity.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/cacti/
Wow. Who would have thought we'd see cellular automata in, um, cells.
OK, I'm being a bit harsh -- this is very cool work. But yes, life does play the game of life. It's called that for a reason.
--Dan
I know lots of people will get lost on the fact that they are decribing yet another thing in terms of computers or computation. Yes it's happened before, yes it will happen again. Telephones, Telegraph, Radio, Internet, etc.
People used to describe atoms in terms of billiard balls, and light in terms of waves or particles. While ultimately not correct, each new model allows you to discover more about the thing your investigating.
The models are useful until they break down. Even then they are sometimes more useful because you realize that there is something else going on and things are not quite waves, not quite particles, yet each is correct at times.
Hopefully this will allow a better understanding of how plants work, or even allow us to build better computers by translating the biological model into new computers. Ok, not talking sky-net here, but the sarcasm is a bit high.
If you RTFA :) it pretty much describes the stomata as cellular automata as in the game of life where they operate by simple rules based on their neighbours. The result is emergent behaviour that is computation. Pretty clever.
Makes me wonder if forests also act like this as well ... forests are very old, in fact the rainforests of Australia have existed since well before the breakup of Gondwana and are probably 100 million years old and trees do signal one another via chemical messages I recall.
Bitter and proud of it.
a n d t h e y t a s t e g o o d t o o
The Earth is one big supercomputer. Nothing more, nothing less.
Patent: from Latin patere, to be open
When I eat a nice pork chop, at least it's dead. When you bite into that apple, it's STILL ALIVE! Can you hear the tiny distributed screams?
They didn't happen to be of the family Cannabis sativa did they?
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
...That's nice and all, but if I can't play games on 'em, what's the point?
It's sad when choosing an installation directory on your own qualifies you as an "advanced user."
"Acacia trees produce tannin in their leaves when browsed by animals. The tannin tastes so bad that the animal stops eating this acacia tree. Other acacia trees downwind sense that tannin is being produced. These trees quickly produce tannin, thus discouraging the animals from eating these trees too."
- Source
-kgj
-kgj
Isn't cellular automata named so because it mimics cellular behavior? (well, aside from residing in grid/cells...) Or Conway's game of Life because it resembles lifelike behavior?
...but that's the saddest excuse to link something in nature to computers.
What really gets me is how they get off calling it a form of "thinking." It's primitave chemical reactions! (Well, so is our brain to an extent, but lets not get into that)
Anyway, on a more relevant note: Most of the article is just hyped up computer mumbo-jumbo and try to link it with simple common sense about biology - Yes... organisims function through chemical reactions. Now just because something performs chemical reactions doesn't mean that you should talk about it in the sense of a computer.
Basically if you take any system of reactions you can model it somehow like a computer. After all, there is order to the reactions and it can be modeled, explored, and manipulated to give a certian outcome based on the starting environment. Put that into a system that already has self-sustaining parts to it that rely on external chemical reactions (like ants, or in this case leaves), and yes... you could call it 'distributed computing', but there's no point in doing that and you end up just looking stupid to most people.
Howard Bloom's latest, "Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century" seems relevant here. I've only just begun reading it, but this article appears to fit right in with Bloom's theories on group evolution, networks within complex adaptive systems in nature, and the possibility of a global massive data-sharing mind. Worth a look--> howardbloom.net
I can't wait until I'll get my SETI@home calculation cluster. It'll consist of three petunias, eight marijuana plants and a lawn.
THIS IS THE INTERNET. PLEASE PICK UP YOUR SERIOUS BUSINESS SUIT AT THE FRONT COUNTER.
well, doh. "Really smart scientists have discovered that living organisms perform the computation of a massively linked network of cells to optimize the (hard) problems of survival and reproduction. Within these cells, hugely complicated molecular mechanisms ensure I/O of signals and transmitters to other linked cells."
That doesn't occur to me to be a particularly deep insight, given the current knowledge about biology and evolution. Not wanting to take the magic out of microbiology or anything, but could some enlightened person in that field describe, why this is profoundly cool, worthy of a publication in Nature?
Thanks!
What's this "Interesting" crap? This is one of my few legitimate uses of the abbreviation "LOL."
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
Whispering grass
dont tell the trees
cos the trees dont
need to know
siggy played guitar
No, no, no, Mr. Officer! These 55 marijuana crops in my backyard? They're not for smoking pot, I swear!
*They're a beowulf cluster, goddamit!*
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
The majority of cactus have a metabolic system called CAM (Crasulacea Acid Metabolism). In such plants, the stomata open at night, thus needing only to respond to light and dark, not to each other. There is no phasing of groups of stomata in the plants epidermises. CO2 enters the stomata at night whereupon mailc acid is synthesized. During the day, stomata are closed and photosyntheses is driven by the energy of the malic acid to produce the various sugars and goodies needed to run the plant.
Only a few very primitive cacti have leaves. The rest grow stems which may be cylindrical or spherical, usually with ribs which facilitate expansion when rains fall.
Check the current Scientific American for information about how bacteria sense the presence of many of their species in order time release of toxins and other activities. The genes and proteins which control these coordinated activities have been identified.
This is just another one of those, "Do you see the [insert anything here] in the Clouds?" Humans like to attribute purpose where it doesn't belong. What's the next headline? A particle of sand dropped in water exhibts ability to compute Navier-Stokes equations?
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
... welcome our vegetable overlords
Maybe Slartibartfast was right......Coming soon...The latest Hyperspace Bypass .....
I have left looking for me. If you encounter me before I do, stop me until I arrive at myself...
Well, I don't know about other plants, but it seems apples do.
Sig test - do not mod.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
for the Humanitarians!
We can't eat meat because animals are thinking creatures, and it looks like plants now fall into the same category. Which leaves only one source of food that we know does NOT think...
All your rhizomes are belong to us.
Of course it's nothing new. Didn't Card already discover this about the descolada in the third book of the Ender's series?
Sow faster! We got on Slashdot!
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
> guess any argument including infinite anything has problems to begin with
Watch it: does that mean you don't believe singularities exist? Or what about the big bang. At the moment prior to the big bang, the universe was an infinitely dense point.
This is my sig.
Hey, man. It's been a while since I didn't hear your electronic voice on AIM. Guess you've been pretty busy these last days. Hope to see you soon. Biyyyyaaatch. jdifool
Let's overcome our weakness.
The footnote isn't in the electronic edition I linked to, but is in my print edition. I don't know if Watson et al. are real references or purely fictional, but they could count as even more prior art, possibly. Either way, Edgar Allen Poe certainly knew it long before that young Sid Meyer whippersnapper knew it. And he even attributed it to the fungi as well. (Read further for that bit.)
ProofReading Markup Language - and yes, I find typos.