> 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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
Has some history of the causes and it seems that the fall of mercantilism happening around the same time as the rise of capitalism, during a period of European imperialism, just after the agricultural revolution had a lot to do with it.
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.
> 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.