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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.
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 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"
Most systems, human or evolutionary, start out simple and end up very complex, sometimes not even resembling what they started out as.
Like flying. One theory is that bugs first grew wings as solar heaters, as this allowed them to survive colder areas. Mutant larger wings let them glide, gliding led to flight.
As for polination, I would assume plants started out by using the wind to move the pollen, and then through mutation some attracted bugs which for any number of reasons proved benefitial and made them more fit. Bugs that were benefited by the plants also became more fit as they had a new and stable food source.
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."
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.
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?
Actually, the first plants started using water to move their "seeds": it was more like some kind of sperm that male plants would release into water in hope they would reach female ovules. This was the very first method used by plants to reproduce (actually, we, humans, are using this exact same method). Next they used the wind to move their pollen around and finally, as you said, they're using bugs, which are very efficient since they move from plant to plant, carrying the pollen from a plant to the other without much lost.
The pollination example you gave is similar to the tired creationist argument of the eye, which asserts that the eye is too complex to have evolved piece by piece. This is, of course, incorrect. Scientists have determined how the eye could have evolved, and have found examples of each stage.
Pollinators could have evolved like this (though IANA botanist):
There's no stretch of imagination here. It's a clear progression of small changes, each reinforcing the earlier change.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
Interestingly, a plant getting damaged will emit chemicals into the air. When other plants detect these chemicals, they will up their production of insect- and fungi-deterrents.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
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.
The Cactus Pore pic makes funky wallpaper if you set it as a tile.
ls
is give peas a chance.
(uh. that hurt.)
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.
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?
"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
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.
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.
Check out Gaia Theory. And no, it's not some metaphysical or spiritual "Earth has a soul" type crap, but rather something like this tree thing in the article, except on global scale, and across species. The basic idea is that life on Earth not only passively affects Earth's biosphere while living in it, but actually regulates it (slowly, over long perioids of time) to create and maintain optimal environment for itself. For example our atmosphere is chemically quite unstable, yet almost unchanging over long long perioids of time. Is it just accident it stays almost stable, not varying from one extreme to other, or is there a more complex global mechanism?
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.
The answer is - bit by bit. It is a fallacy to think that systems need to jump from state A to state B without passing through any ointermediate states. Flowers probably originally pollinated by the wind, for their own purpises, and bees originally raided flowers without concern for the flowers need. But the bees accidentally distributed the pollen better than the wind, so flowers that got pollinated by bees did better than those that didn't. An flowers that produced an excesss of sweet sap attracted more bees than those that didn't (a) got more bees and (b) got less pollen eaten, because the bees took the cheaper sap. And bees that worked out which kind of plants gave away this sweet sap ate better than those that didn't. And flowers that learmed to signal "Hey, I've got honey" go more than those which had honey and didn't advertise. And bes which learned to depend upon a slower which was successful (in part because they pollinated it) did better than those that didn't.
Evolution doesn't take flying leaps. It takes hundreds and thousands of tiny steps. All that it requres to get from A to B is that there is a continuous path from A to B, and that every single step along that path, however tiny, moves just a tiny bit closer to B.
Somebody has moddeled the formation of the eye from, essentially, blank skin, evolving through sensitive skin, a "visual pit", a simple cover over the pit, to developing the lens and focussing mechanism as we see it. This took something like 100,000 steps. And for each of those steps, the proto-eye that formed was just a tiny bit better than the one before and would therefore have benefitted its owner just a tiny bit. Of course, these steps would onlynhave happened very occasionally. But if a step only happened every 100 generations, and there were one generation a year (slow for insects and other small animals) to is only 10 million years - yasterday to geologists.
What doubters of evolution often don't realise is how tiny an advantage evolution can work on over enough generations. A 1% advantage is much more than enough spread through a whole population. If it is a 1% advantage ofer the whole range, the species advances (avolves) as a whole. If it is a 1% advantage in some areas not others (e.g. cold tolerance favours those at the cold end of the range) the species will split into two lines which will specialise in different areas.
To get on topic as to how this particular trait might have evolve, look at the largest grid we know - the world economy. This didn't spring to life in one leap. It evolved from very local communication (I give you meat, you give me sex), neigbourly communication (I give you meat, you give me axeheads), distant communications (I give you silver, you give me spices) to abstract communications (I give you green paper, you give me insurance policy) in many stages. You cannot pinpoint where "the economy" started. But it wasn't around 10,000 years ago, and it is around now.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
> So how does the plant realize that these other lifeforms are useful for pollen-spreading?
Go look up evolution in a dictonary, there is no realization or thought involved, just that since something as simple as bees could spread the seed while obtaining food can make it more widespread & therefore wore likely to live on in future generations.
> why did some plants form defensive mechanisms such as poisons
Easy: they have different ways of reproducing. Poison ivy doesn't have the luxury of being sweet easily spreadable by bees, so it would have had to work on protection instead of enticement. If animals get sick when eating a plant, they won't eat it any more. Therefore, since the threat of eating is lessened, the plant lives longer and has a better chance to spread.
Tell me, are you the same troll that ask that same question in every single biology-related science thread? Or is there a beowulf clusters of you?
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
Why would they mutate at the same time, or perfectly?
Proto-bees used plants as food source, wich had the side effect of helping those very plants reproduce by bringing sexual material from plant to plant. Plants that mutated in ways that made this less likely did not benefit from it and were replaced by plants that mutated in ways that helped it (by making them easier to find, say by having bright colors). Rinse, repeat, you get plants that have evolved to use bees as sexual carriers.
While this is going on, bees that mutated in a way that reduced pollination had smaller food sources than the bees that mutated in a way that helped it (hairy legs that carry more pollen). The hairy-legged bees had more food-giving plants around their hives, and so on.
Now its your turn.
Tell me: if there is only one god and he created all life at once and then wiped it all off except what Noah could fit in his floating barn. Why weren't there any wallabies in mesopotamia? How did they all get back to the other side of the world after the flood without anyone ever noticing them along the way?
And how did they get from oceania to mesopotamia in the first place?
If your god could teleport of fly them from one continent to the other, why would he need an ark at all? He could just levitate them during the flood, or create a flood-free bubble around them, or give them all gills for 2 months, being omnipotent and all...why even bother with an ark?
You can't take the sky from me...