Towards fungal computer (2018)

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.

+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...

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.

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.

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).