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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.
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]
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.
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."
"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
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.
> 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.