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It’s very pretty, isn’t it. Graceful, simple, elegant. It’s all that, as well as a remarkably robust self-sustaining botanical system. See those little seeds? Think of each of those seeds as a computer program. Once the seed-program has been pollinated and germinated, it becomes operational. It begins processing data: sunlight, moisture, mineral content of the surrounding soil. The program has a runtime of maybe a few months. The slender and supple plant, the attractive flower…they’re part of the output of the seed-program. It’s a self-replicating program; the point of the seed is to produce another seed.
Not the same seed. A slightly different seed. Each time the program is run, the input data are slightly different. Each iteration produces a slighty different result, a difference that is likely to be imperceptible to casual scrutiny. The leaves might be slightly wider, the petals slightly more yellow, the roots slightly longer. Just slightly.
It’s not about improvement; some of those changes might make the plant more robust; some might make it less resistant to infection. It’s just about the program responding to new data. It’s not about producing a more graceful and elegant flower. It’s just about computation.
But it is very pretty, isn’t it.
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