5 ms·
The mystery of the mimic plant (2022)
- Wherecombinator 3y agoOn iOS here and half the screen is taken up by a cookie pop up and my only option to dismiss it is by accepting. Is that legal in the eu?
- e40 3y agoDon’t see that myself but using a couple of extensions in safari. 1Blocker and AdGuard.
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoDisable JS. No popup or anything. Full article visible.
- ajb 3y agoSame on Firefox on Android, but reader mode gets past the popup The plant the article is talking about is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boquila https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boquila which can apparently mimic nearby plants of different species, and can mimic several at the same time. It's not understood how yet. One experiment showed that it could mimic fake plastic plants, which would be mind blowing as it would require something approaching vision, but the study apparently has flaws.
- melagonster 3y agothe interesting part is main author of the research just did his experiments in home. he contacted a professor and hope professor do research on his plant. but the professor encouraged him finish this by himself. unfortunately, this why critics found problems in it.
- ajb 3y agoDoes that mean this plant is easy to obtain? That would be cool! (Edited to add - yes, I can find it online for £25)
- melagonster 3y agogue I don't need response, thank you :)
- n8cpdx 3y agoBetween 1Blocker, consent-o-matic, and Lockdown Mode, I didn’t have any issues. I checked and lockdown mode isn’t the cause of the good experience this time, so it must be one of the extensions.
- nayuki 3y agoxkcd mimic octopus: https://xkcd.com/928/ https://xkcd.com/928/ (2011-07-22)
- smusamashah 3y agoFYI, ChatGPT-4 fails when you ask which plant mimics leaves and always give wrong answers. But if you give it name of this plant it will tell you it is known for mimicking leaves.
- raldi 3y agoThat’s a known issue with LLMs; you can train them hard on “The capital of England is London” and they’ll consistently give the correct answer for “What’s the capital of England?” but then fail miserably at, “What is London the capital of?”
- chagen 3y agoWhat you're saying was true for primitive LLMs from a couple years ago, but in my experience, any of the advanced LLMs today (GPT-4, Claude, etc.) have no issue with this. I'm open to changing my mind if you can provide any examples of GPT-4 failing at this task.
- raldi 3y agoIt's complicated: https://andrewmayne.com/2023/11/14/is-the-reversal-curse-real/ https://andrewmayne.com/2023/11/14/is-the-reversal-curse-rea...
- chagen 3y agoThat was a nice read, but it looks like the article concludes that the "Reversal Curse" observed by the authors of the paper is likely better attributed to the researchers' methodology. Some quotes from that article: "As mentioned before, It’s important to keep in mind ChatGPT and GPT-4 can do B is A reasoning. The researchers don’t dispute that." "So in summation: I don’t think any of the examples the authors provided are proof of a Reversal Curse and we haven’t observed a “failure of logical deduction.” Simpler explanations are more explanatory: imprecise prompts, underrepresented data and fine-tuning errors." "Since the main claim of the paper is “LLMs trained on “A is B” fail to learn “B is A”“, I think it’s safe to say that’s not true of the GPT-3.5-Turbo model we fine-tuned."
- vinnymac 3y agoSciShow did a video on the subject. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5UWWsYw9fH0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5UWWsYw9fH0 If trees are capable of communicating at the roots with nearby offspring through mycelium, while sharing resources and information, why couldn’t a vine?
- MichaelZuo 3y agoIf it can mimic plastic plants placed next to it, and do that repeatedly under more rigorous experimental conditions, then it would seem to suggest the conclusion, that this vine can somehow visually 'see'.
- anotheryou 3y agolast time I checked evidence for that seemed a bit inconclusive
- m3kw9 3y agoits cells could detect discrete levels of light to detect a shape
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y agoThe phenomena is very interesting, but the article is useless. This is a very simple and telling experiment - if the plant can mimic a plastic plant then it rules out all sort of potential explanations, and would have to be based on light (but let's not go overboard and say it'd require "vision" or a brain). So, why haven't hundreds of university labs, or amateur plant lovers attempted to replicate or improve the experiment, and if they have why doesn't the article present the results?
- samstave 3y agoPut plants made from Lego next to it and see if it’s mimicking the physical surrounding as it senses the environment from the way the photons are hitting it. If the photons also carry the color of and it can sense the color of the photons, I wonder how similar this is to camelions and actopi and cuttle fish…
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y agoWhat's most interesting to me isn't just how this plant does it, but how such a capability evolved ... There has to have been other more primitive sensing/copying capabilities that evolved into this, but what are/were they, and what were the evolutionary benefits of those more primitive capabilities ? Are there any other plants still existing today that react to light in more than just a present/not-present or directional way ?
- NotGMan 3y agoThe book "The Secret Life of Plants" is a very interesting ones and sheds interesting light on many unknown features of plants. But it requires an open mind, not something most acedemics are known for :)
- block_dagger 3y agoSkepticism is a valuable pillar of science. Extraordinary claims, etc.
- jemmyw 3y agoI looked at the photos on the article and I'm hard pressed to call that mimicry. The leaves of the vine could just have a ragged and smooth configuration. The Wikipedia entry for this plant just seems to repeat the same source as the article. So colour me skeptical for the moment.
- icychat 3y ago[flagged]