Intelligence is going to be embedded in everything -- smart clothes, smart furniture, smart air.
I still think of a computer as a piece of hardware, a metal box with "electronics" inside. But if you told me that a cup of water could also be a computer, I'd have a hard time imagining that. It's one of those paradigm shifts that separates us from the future. Like if you just discovered fire, but then someone tells you there's another way to "cook" food in the slow fire of fermentation.
You would realize that food is cooking all the time, without our intervention. We just learned how to control it.
If I try to imagine that a river can be a computer, it's hard. You mean the weather itself can be a computer that we can then use to forecast the weather? Yes, something like that, but not really (Gödel might want a word).
Image credit: Efoia via Fractal Forums - Pseudo-kleinian folded with sphere inversion rendered in Oak Fractal Sandbox with Monte Carlo path tracing - 2017 [link]
How simple liquids like water can perform complex calculations
Jan 2022, phys.org
Reservoir computing is a relatively recent idea in computing. Instead of traditional binary programs run on semiconductor chips, the reactions of a nonlinear dynamical system—the reservoir—are used to perform much of the calculation. Various nonlinear dynamical systems from quantum processes to optical laser components have been considered as reservoirs."It turns out that deionized water is best for solving second-order nonlinear problems." The good performance of these solutions demonstrates their potential for more complicated tasks, such as handwriting font recognition, isolated word recognition, and other classification tasks", says Professor Akai-Kasaya.
I'm having visions of Stanislaw Lem's Solaris (1961), which featured an extra-terrestial intelligent terrestrial, aka a planetary superorganism. Considering that Lem intended to explore "the limitations of human rationality", I imagine he would enjoy seeing this branch of science develop.
via Osaka University: Shaohua Kan et al, Physical Implementation of Reservoir Computing through Electrochemical Reaction, Advanced Science (2021). DOI: 10.1002/advs.202104076
Researchers find a single-celled slime mold with no nervous system that remembers food locations
Feb 2021, phys.org
The researchers discovered that the organism weaves memories of food encounters directly into the architecture of the network-like body and uses the stored information when making future decisions."Past feeding events are embedded in the hierarchy of tube diameters, specifically in the arrangement of thick and thin tubes in the network," says Mirna Kramar, first author of the study.
via Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization and Technical University of Munich: Mirna Kramar et al. Encoding memory in tube diameter hierarchy of living flow network, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2007815118
Thinking without a brain - Studies in brainless slime molds reveal that they use physical cues to decide where to grow
Jul 2021, phys.org
Physarum polycephalum uses its body to sense mechanical cues in its surrounding environment, and performs computations similar to what we call "thinking".
via Wyss Institute at Harvard University and the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University: Advanced Materials (2021). DOI: 10.1002/adma.202008161
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