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 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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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