
Towards fungal computer (2018) - filkatron
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6227805/
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haecceity
So they made some gates out of fungus?

> Thus, it would take about half an hour for a signal in the fungal computer
> to propagate 1 m. The low speed of signal propagation is not a critical
> disadvantage of potential fungal computers, because they never meant to
> compete with conventional silicon devices.

> Likely application domains of fungal devices could be large-scale networks
> of mycelium which collect and analyse information about environment of soil
> and, possibly, air and execute some decision-making procedures.

Pretty neat. There's a computer growing in the corner of my room.

~~~
variaga
Sort of - the experiment was more limited than that. Basically they show some
congruence between electrical potential propagation in actual fungi vs a
simulation model, then demonstrate that it's possible to build gates in the
model.

Actually building gates out of fungi is left for future work :

> ideas developed in the automaton model of a fungal computer should be
> verified in laboratory experiments with fungi.

Still fascinating that spiking electrical potentials travel through mycelium
(where the "spikes" average 4 min in duration, and are separated by hours).
Fungal computers seems more suited to some kind of Church of the Long Now
project than anything you'd want to interact with.

For low-power multi-acre fungal computers in fiction, I can recommend "Surface
Detail" by Iain M Banks. (not the focus of the story, but they do end up being
a key plot element).

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m3kw9
Imagine in the Stone Age where people discovered and used this

~~~
reedwolf
I can't help imagining an alternate history where a follower of Pythagoras
stumbles across the mathematics underpinning universal computation. They or
someone else creates a rudimentary programming language to fully express these
ideas. Then Archimedes builds a mechanical computer to execute programs in
that language. Perhaps Hero of Alexandria develops a steam-powered variant,
and one of the successors of Alexander The Great puts the computer to use in
warfare and conquers the world. Science is accelerated so that nuclear physics
is discovered by the time Jesus is born...okay, enough for now.

~~~
krilly
I assume that people have debated this before, but... Why exactly did the
industrial revolution happen when it did? And what factors could have caused
it to happen much earlier?

~~~
fao_
This might seem rude or presumptuous, and I really don't mean to come across
that way but I don't know another way to say it.

Go open a history book.

Seriously! Not enough people here, and (broadly) in computing circles,
actually bother to obtain even basic undergraduate or pre-undergraduate
knowledge about other fields, and yet they feel more than content to argue
about a myriad of topics and to even form opinions and _argue for them_ ,
based on this complete and utter lack of knowledge! There are too many people
on this site and others arguing about, say, sociology, without even bothering
to _google_ about the topic, let alone opening up a sociology 101 textbook and
skimming it, and it is blisteringly obvious (and extremely depressing) to
people who _have_.

Any answer you have here can only be answered by someone who has studied the
industrial revolution, anything else, and everything else, is pure conjecture.
Unfortunately it won't be treated as such, because argument ex culo seems to
be the norm for people inducted into computers or statistics.

A lot of the 'debates' here could be completely nullified (or raised to a
higher level) if the people arguing about topics here actually took half an
hour out of their day to read an introductory undergraduate text first, or
even just opened up google and typed in their question first.

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f0ok
"I acknowledges pearl oyster mushrooms P. ostreatus for their cooperation in
the studies."

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sporkologist
It's the dawn of mycocomputing!

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basementcat
+1 for the acknowledgements.

The author has done quite a bit of work on computing with slime mold and other
biological substrates.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Adamatzky%20A%5BAu...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Adamatzky%20A%5BAuthor%5D&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=30443330)

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carapace
See also "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous
System" (youtube.com)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698)

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dang
Related from earlier today:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21962075](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21962075)

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bwang29
So, from this, it would be true that any set of living things can be modeled
into a general purpose computing device that can process certain Turing
complete language.

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zzzeek
related:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hex_(Discworld)#Structure_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hex_\(Discworld\)#Structure_and_technology)

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steve1977
I have to read some Rudy Rucker again...

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shireboy
This was part of the plot of a recent Star Trek Discovery season. Left me
wondering if writers had eaten mushrooms...

~~~
systematical
I had the same thought

