Do plant divide?

[Dilawar]

Recently, a popular plant among biologists has been accused of doing division [1]. Division is a extremely complicated task for a plant to do. A program which performs division (using simpler operation of subtraction) needs a comparator. This adds a control-flow to a program. Since plants lack neurons, it is hard to see how can they do it.

 The experiment is summarized by a mathematician:

A plant creates starch during daylight and then consumes it at night, when it is dark. Its survival is dependent on having enough starch to make it through the night. Otherwise, it will stop growing, and could even die. If the plant has units of starch and there are hours left till dawn, it wants to consume roughly units of starch. This is clearly optimal: a nice uniform rate of consumption of the available food.

  [authors] varied the amount of light and found that the plants were very good at appearing to do the above calculation. The plants almost always consumed about of the total starch that was available at the start of the night.

Therefore the paper concludes that "the plants must have some biological mechanism that performs division". As usual questions are being asked if such is really the case. But that is a question which biologists must address.

Meanwhile one can ask a similar question. Let's say we have two buckets S and T both containing s and t balls. Can a random process on these two buckets mimic the behavior of division s/t with 95% confidence level? 

REF:
[1] http://elife.elifesciences.org/content/2/e00669

- Dilawar