Computers from plants

Adamatzky, Andrew

Abstract

Plants are highly intelligent organisms. They continuously make distributed processing of sensory information, concurrent decision making and parallel actuation. The plants are efficient green computers per se. Outside in nature, the plants are programmed and hardwired to perform a narrow range of tasks aimed to maximize the plants’ ecological distribution, survival and reproduction. To ‘persuade’ plants to solve tasks outside their usual range of activities, we must either choose problem domains which homomorphic to the plants natural domains or modify biophysical properties of plants to make them organic electronic devices. We discuss possible designs and prototypes of computing systems that could be based on morphological development of roots, interaction of roots, and analog electrical computation with plants, and plant-derived electronic components. In morphological plant processors data are represented by initial configuration of roots and configurations of sources of attractants and repellents; results of computation are represented by topology of the roots’ network. Computation is implemented by the roots following gradients of attractants and repellents.

• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 7, 2019
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Book Title: Inspired by Nature
• ISBN: 9783319679969
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67997-6_17
• Keywords: computers plants
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/872810
• Publisher URL: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-67997-6_17