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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."
...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"
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!
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.
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.
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.