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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."
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
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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."
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
"Maybe Disney will make a cartoon about a happy little vegetable. He will be called Buddy the Carrot. He'll lose his mother to the farmer when he picks her, and eats her. That could do to vegetables what Bambi did to meat! Carrots may in fact be more intelligent than deer. Who knows for sure?"
Read more.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
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.
Insightful? I guess the mods, like the editors, don't bother the read the links. The Uncoveror's about as reputable a source as The Onion.
I wonder if this is really complex at all as far as nature is concerned. We are just at this point in computing without really solving for complex AI, so this must be something similar to reflex or an involuntary response.
The fact that ants may exhibit the same behavior makes me wonder about their level of awareness: is being vegetative really not as low a state as we believe it, or maybe we give ants too much credit, or maybe this is an example of a hive mind. Or is this something found throughtout most of nature and only where self-awareness/individuality comes in do things behave on their own in a viral devouring nature. Certainly viruses are not complex compared to humans, but as many times as we've heard human intelligence glorified, we have also been compared to ravenous viruses.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
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.
Which is why, if you notice, a lot of Hindus do not eat things like Garlic, Onions, Carrots, Potatos, and the like -- anything where a plant is killed.
I'm skeptical about this assertion. Just a couple of common items of Indian cuisine would seem to disprove your case: onion bhajee and sag aloo (potato). Perhaps you are thinking of Jainism?
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
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.
> Fuck the hippies.
Hell no, man! With all that "free love," I bet they have plenty of "free diseases," too.