You may have heard of organoid intelligence recently: that revolutionary new form of computing that theoretically promises to dethrone artificial intelligence. It consists of no longer relying on processors but on neuron cultures to enable the computer to carry out its calculations. But today I want to draw your attention to an even more exotic way of calculating. Instead of developing new algorithms or trying to mimic how the human brain works, English scientists have decided to entrust the work of computers to mushrooms.
This article is a written version of the VitamineVitamine Tech podcast, which can be found on the Futura podcast site and all good listening platforms.
At the Unconventional Computing Lab — an aptly named research space — researcher and director Andrew Adamatzky set out to explore how mushrooms could replace processors in the hypothetical future. The lab, which is affiliated with the University of the West of England in Bristol, has its usual fixtures of immaculate worktops, computers and measuring equipment, but what sets it apart are the wooden crates that line its shelves. Inside, a strange white and fuming material from which a lot of colorful threads escape. A little further, tiny oyster mushrooms grow on a motherboard placed on one of the countertops. And we even see a piece of mossy wood covered with small schizophylls, each connected to an electrode. Welcome to the UK’s only wet lab set up within an IT department!
Wetware Computers: The Organic Future of Computers
A wet lab, or more commonly an experimental lab, is a place where researchers handle chemicals, liquids, or biological substances. It’s usually the kind of research that hardly mixes with computer design, with its fragile components that run on electricity and generally favor controlled environments. But if we are to enter a new technological age and break through the glass ceiling that seems to be looming over our heads, we need to question the foundations on which computing has been built so far. The paradigm we currently rely on has enabled absolutely incredible and extremely rapid developments over the past few decades. But many experts are now formal: technological innovation is losing speedspeed. Granted, we’re nowhere near the frontier of what we can accomplish, as evidenced by the inevitable explosion of generative artificial intelligence, but for some researchers it’s already time to explore alternative ways of thinking in preparation for the next step.
And that is exactly the ambition Adamatzky defended when he founded the laboratory for unconventional computations in 2001. For him, the computers of the coming century will consist of chemical or living systems working in harmony with electronic circuits, screens, software, etc. We call them wetware computers if we try to translate that literally. Does that sound totally futuristic to you? Imagine that one of the groundbreaking experiments in this field dates back to 1999, when researcher William Ditto tried to build a protocomputer from leech neurons. What led Adamatzky to the trail of fungi rather than blood-sucking critters were the studies he had conducted on the blob for ten years. In case you don’t know, we told you about it on an old episode of our Beasts of Science podcast on animal intelligence. Here’s what Marie said about it from the Curiosity Box: “Its real name is Physarum polycepahlum, it’s a very terrestrial unicellular organism. Neither plant nor fungus nor animal, it is said to be an amoebozoan. […] The bloblob is also the king of shortcuts: he always knows how to find the shortest route, whether it’s a straight line or through a tangled maze. And it’s so good at laying paths that engineers might even learn from it one day. »
Find our episode on the Blob on the Bêtes de Science family podcast dedicated to animal intelligence.
The Wood Wide Web gets involved
The blob’s amazing properties therefore prompted Adamatzky and his colleagues to test its computational abilities. Given the right stimuli, they managed to prove that this unattractive type of gelatin could be used to solve problems, illustrate mathematical concepts, and even simulate logic gates that, without going into detail, form the fundamentals of electronics. So, Adamatzky thinks, if the blob formed from a single cell can achieve such results, what could a whole network of fungi achieve? Because yes, fungi are organized in a network, and let me tell you, their importance in our ecosystems is still grossly underestimated by the general public. It is thanks to the work of enthusiasts like biologist Merlin Sheldrake, whose reading I highly recommend, that the fascinating subterranean life of fungi is only just beginning to emerge.
Because if we know these little organisms primarily for the delicious omelettes and risottos that they let us simmer, we actually only have the tip of the iceberg in mind. The fruit of the mushroom, that is, the part that we pick—or that we don’t touch, depending on the situation—forms only the animal’s reproductive system. Enough for you to see your fried chanterelles from a different angle. The fungus continues to grow underground, far beyond your location. It forms long, fine, and tangled filaments called mycelium, which it uses to feed itself but also to communicate. Invisible to our eyes, a huge and very dense branching carpet connects the fungi to each other, but also to the plants with which they can maintain symbiotic relationships. We’ve barely started exploring the facets of this plant-based internet, and already it’s looking at least as promising as the blob. It’s no wonder, then, that the Unconventional Computing Lab turned to mushrooms to revolutionize computers, deciphering their language in the process, to learn more about what has been poetically dubbed “the Wood Wide Web.”
Fungi that think like neurons
How to learn to speak mushroom? Valid question and the good news is that we already have part of the answer. Because it turns out that the way mycelium works isn’t entirely different from that of the neural network that populates our cranial cavities. In fact, Adamatzky and his team found that the fungi produce spikes similar to action potentials. An action potential is a variation measured in the electrical activity of a neuron as it communicates with its neighbors. It is visualized as a spike followed by a drop in voltage and a return to normal in its electrical activity. And amazingly, the fungi in the lab seem to be communicating via action potentials very similar to what you can listen to this podcast with. From here on, to say, “It’s not human, it’s a fungus” is perhaps going a bit far, but it still means researchers are dealing with a mode of communication that’s more familiar than one might expect .
So they got to work, snuggling cultures of mycelium into boxes filled with hemp and wood shavings, then planting electrodes in the colony once grown so they could read the electrical sonic pulses… “ghost,” for lack of a better term. A peak can thus be read as 1 and its absence as 0 and the foundation for a 100% organic binary system is laid! The duration of the spikes and the time interval separating them were encoded and then combined with logic gates to obtain a protocomputer capable of inferring. And the icing on the cake: if you stimulate the mycelium at two different points, the conductivity between these points increases and they start to communicate faster and more reliably. Thus, by strengthening this connection, the lab team creates a habit, an automatism that can be simply termed memory. Not bad, right?
On the way to a hybrid intelligence of computers
Based on this same principle, researchers hope to develop a new form of so-called “organoid” intelligence, this time using cultures of three-dimensional neurons. A development that is promising enough to make headlines for several weeks, but that does not prevent us from delving into the possibilities of the mycelium, which deserves at least as much attention. So far, Adamatzky’s team has worked with oyster mushrooms, ghost mushrooms, resinous ganoderma, enoki, fissured mushrooms and specimens of the species Cordyceps militaris, including fans of The Last of They who have usually concluded that it is a parasitic fungus. Though unlikely to ever reach the computational speed of traditional computers, mushroom computers are not without advantages. In particular, they might be more tolerant of failures thanks to their self-healing powers. The fact that they are constantly growing and evolving also makes them reconfigurable at will, depending on the new functionalities that researchers wish to implement.
Finally, the latest technological innovations, impressive as they are, still have a long, long way to go to achieve the energy efficiency that nature knows how to show. Remember, I told you about it in an old episode of Vitamine Tech, back when it was called the Techpod: “To pronounce those words you’re hearing, it’s estimated that my brain uses a little between 10 and 20 watts. That’s less than that.” most economical light bulbs. Let’s be clear, you need more energy to light up your living room than it does to run the hundreds of operations your brain performs every second. All in all, let’s not get too excited – me first. Adamatzky points out that they are currently only at the stage of feasibility studies. The aim is first to prove that it would be possible to produce circuits from micellar cultures. However, he doesn’t seem too enthusiastic either, as he already envisions computer cultures in the lab and maybe even mushroom brains. The researcher’s interview on the PopSci site doesn’t tell us if he intends to make them edible or poisonous.