Condensed Matter Seminar: Plant Tropisms as a Window on Memory, Computation, and Actuation in Distributed Systems

Plants solve complex navigational problems, continuously negotiating their unstructured and changing environment. They strategically redirect their growth to optimize photosynthesis in response to fluctuating light sources, while minimizing mechanical strains. While they have no brain or neural system, they can sense their environment, process sensory information, and plan strategic growth movements. Since plants are distributed systems, with no central control, underlying computational processes must be emergent properties of the tissue. In this talk I will give an overview of how plants accomplish this hierarchically at different scales: (i) decentralized computation at the tissue level, underpinning integration of sensory information over space and time, (ii) morphological computation at the organismal level, where plants capitalize on the interplay between active growth and passive mechanics in order to negotiate obstacles, and (iii) collective dynamics of crowded plants, at the group level.