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."

Comments

Distributed computing plants?

[geoffspear]

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of trees...

Re:Distributed computing plants?

[uncoveror]

Plants feel pain, communicate, and may even be sentient, yet vegetarians claim it isn't cruel to eat them. Yes it is! Here is an exerpt from an informative article:

"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.

Re:Distributed computing plants?

[shigelojoe]

Carrots may in fact be more intelligent than deer. Who knows for sure?

Well, I know that a carrot has never wandered out into the middle of the road and into the path of my car. That's got to count in the carrot's favor.

Re:Distributed computing plants?

[Aardpig]

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?

I'm SURE Plants Practice Grid Computing

[deft]

But they probably call it something else.

Do eukaryotic cells practice grid computing?

[hawkfish]

If one thinks of quantum computing as a kind of parallelism, then maybe so.

Re:Do eukaryotic cells practice grid computing?

[wwest4]

other interesting philosophically-related items:

- panpsychism

- supervenience of mind on the brain

- the qualia problem (the crux of the mind-brain problem)

what i find interesting is the idea that what we call is a feature of all systems, and that qualia constitute the condition of being a system - and furthermore, that the reason other systems seem to have varying degrees of sentience has more to do with scale, perspective and apparent similarity than with some ill-defined threshold of consciousness.

Do they call the computing nodes....

[teneighty]

...leaf nodes?

Or are they root nodes?

Yardwork

[Embedded Geek]

No wonder the damn weeds keep coming back so fast - they must be overclocked.

Typical

[dodgyville]

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.

Um, ok

[skintigh2]

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."

Re:Um, ok

[frobber]

I agree - sounds like the obvious dressed up in trendy jargon.

From the article it looks like they're trying to understand how a plant knows how many total pores to have open for breathing, given that each pore only has local information - there's no global sensor telling the pores what to do. They're also interested in why open pores are found in clusters.

A simple answer might involve the following:
(1) the pores are simple oscillators locally linked causing local synchrony. Groups of pores tend to be in sync, and the neighbors of the open group are induced to open because they're near the group. Therefore the pores tend to open near the open group, and close in the middle of the group. The result is travelling waves like a rock thrown in a pond. This type of idea was investigated I think first by Turing (of all people) in 1952 (for example)
(2) either the intrinsic period of each pore's oscillation or it's duty cycle (how long open compared to how long off) is modulated by the pore's detection of how much the plant needs to breathe locally. The result is oscillations all over the plant of openning and closing pores whose open times are modulated to solve the plant's total breathing needs.

Anyway, I don't see what's interesting about calling this computation. Air transmits sounds by local interactions of gas particles and the speed of transmission is modulated by density. But I don't see what is gained by claiming that the air is solving a computation to transmit sound at the right speed!

Re:Um, ok

[Urkki]

• Anyway, I don't see what's interesting about calling this computation. Air transmits sounds by local interactions of gas particles and the speed of transmission is modulated by density. But I don't see what is gained by claiming that the air is solving a computation to transmit sound at the right speed!

Well, there is no right speed of sound, and speed of sound is determined very locally, by the interaction of immediatly neighbouring molecules, and stays about the same regardless of conditions a mere hundred molecules away.

If I understand correctly, the point is that a plant is able to optimize it's gas intake/output without any actual nervous system or central controlling unit, and that for this type of a problem, this might actually be the optimal way of solving the problem.

And problem it is, for plants. Do it wrong and die (either directly or by being suffocated on more successful plant neighbours). So unlike with sound propagation in air, there is an optimal way to do it, perhaps even several almost optimal ways, so a choice is involved. The plant that is able to choose best wins. (Note: I'm not implying concious choice here, any more than a "choice" made by neural network software is concious).

Re:Um, ok

[quinkin]

Heh.

I thought it should have been title "Cellular automatons successfully model yet another cellular matrix feedback system."

Q.

Breaking news: SCO sues God

[Lurker McLurker]

Apparently, there's Unix code in these plants information processing systems.

see also: Microbiology

[Harmotech]

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...

Technologies and how we look at plants

[lost in place]

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?

Re:Evolved?

[Junado]

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.

Re:Evolved?

[bar-agent]

This system under discussion is not especially complex, and has nothing to do with other species or with pollinators.

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):

1. A plant evolves wind-borne pollination.
   
2. A flying insect likes the taste of a plant's sugars. It pierces or chews leaves to get to them.
   
3. Pollen happens to catch on the insect's hairs. Since the insect likes this plant, it visits many in the area, of both sexes.
   
4. The reproductive success of this accidental pollen-spreading is decent enough so that evolution does not favor getting rid of the sweet sugars or developing a repellent for this insect.
   
5. In fact, even sweeter sugar accidentally evolves. That plant branch (no pun intended) attracts more insects and becomes more successful.
   
6. Since the food is richer at these plants than at other plants, insects that spend time at other plants get less food for the time invested. They are selected against.
   
7. Another branch develops a bit of color near the pollen generation sites. The insects are attracted to the color. This branch has more of its pollen collected, compared to other branches. This branch is selected for.
   
8. Etc.

There's no stretch of imagination here. It's a clear progression of small changes, each reinforcing the earlier change.

Say what?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Acacia Tree Communication

[handy_vandal]

"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