Leaves appear to regulate their 'breathing' by conducting simple calculations. 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.This might not sound much like what a computer does, but it is. In distributed computation, signals exchanged between components of the system define the process for solving a problem. Researchers are now exploring the possibility of using distributed computing with swarms of simple robots to carry out tasks, such as searching a landscape, more efficiently than a single, more sophisticated robot could manage. Some scientists even think that distributed computation is fundamental to the way the world works.

In his book A New Kind of Science, mathematician Stephen Wolfram argued that the laws of physics might arise from units of matter, space and time interacting with one another according to simple rules2. He showed that so-called cellular automata - simple, discrete 'particles' programmed to switch between different states depending on the states of their neighbours - can mimic computers.


View: Full Article | Source: Nature Journal