To most people, the word computer conjures up an image of a PC sitting on a desktop. According to a new study, however, complex computations may also be underway in another bit of office equipment: the potted plant that brightens up the windowsill. Plants may perform what scientists call distributed emergent computation. Unlike traditional computation, in which a central processing unit carries out programs, distributed emergent computation lacks a central controller. Instead, large numbers of simple units interact with each other to achieve complex, large-scale computations.
Although the plants don’t add, subtract, multiply, or divide, they do seem to compute solutions to problems of how to coordinate the actions of their cells effectively.