[FRIAM] new Baez/Stay paper on category theory as ako Rosetta stone

[Dale Schumacher]

I clearly don't have a strong enough mathematical background to comprehend
Category Theory.  Hewitt's comments do make sense to me, and reinforce the
notion that "ownership" of the data (storage) associated with a message is
transferred between a sending actor and a receiving actor (both
persistent).  Messages in transit are therefore "owned" by the system,
having a transitory existence that is independent of both sender and
receiver.

I've had an intuitive feeling that the mathematical theories underlying
Maude <http://maude.cs.uiuc.edu/> form a very clean basis for a
computational system.  Maude can express actor-model systems, but it is not
limited to them.  There seems to be the potential to create truly executable
specifications this way.  If it could be packaged in a way that makes it
approachable by non-technical/non-mathematical users, it could be a path
toward making the computer truly an extension or amplification of human
ability, which is what I believe it SHOULD be.

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 9:29 PM, Carl Tollander <carl at plektyx.com> wrote:

> Of possible interest to Category Theory buffs:
>
> John Baez and Mike Stay have a new paper entitled:
>    Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: A Rosetta Stone
> at:  http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/rosetta.pdf
>
> In the subsequent discussion at the N-Category Cafe
> at:
>
> http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2008/03/physics_topology_logic_and_com.html#c015742
> Mike Stay talks a bit about Actors in this framework,
> which those who talked to Dale Schumacher several weeks ago after his
> FRIAM talk might find interesting.
>
> (note to Dale, this is a bit different from what I had in mind
> (i.e. a population of heterogenous agents using CT to build and maintain
> neutral networks)
> during our FRIAM conversation, but it gives you a sense of how the
> correspondence between CT and Actors might be established.)
>
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