Complexity Digest 2004.04 - 09.01
Jan. 27, 2004
Excerpts: Plants appear to 'think', according to US researchers, who say that green plants engage in a form of problem-solving computation.
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 units1.
It's the same form of maths that is widely thought to regulate how ants forage. The signals that each ant sends out to other ants, by laying down chemical trails for example, enable the ant community as a whole to find the most abundant food sources.
http://www.nature.com/nsu/040119/images/stomata_180.jpg
Tiny holes in plant leaves open and close thanks to quick computations.
© SPL
- Source: Do Plants Act Like Computers?
[ http://www.nature.com/nsu/040119/040119-5.html ], Philip Ball, Nature Science Update, 04/01/21
