Re: Non-cartesian closedness of Met (ptj@maths.cam.ac.uk)

[Vaughan Pratt <pratt@cs.stanford.edu>]

Peter, can you generalize your argument to a necessary and sufficient
condition on V such that the usual closed structure on V-Cat is cartesian?

This is of interest for its applicability to models of concurrent
computation, as follows.

My group's 1989 paper "Temporal Structures",

http://boole.stanford.edu/pub/man90.pdf

presented at CTCS-89 in Manchester and later in journal form as  Mathematical
Structures in Computer Science, Volume 1:2, 179-213 (July 1991), had the
following abstract.

"We combine the principles of the Floyd-Warshall-Kleene algorithm, enriched
categories, and Birkhoff arithmetic, to yield a useful class of algebras of
transitive vertex-labeled spaces.  The motivating application is a uniform
theory of abstract or parametrized time in which to any given notion of
time there corresponds an algebra of concurrent behaviors and their
operations, always the same operations but interpreted automatically and
appropriately for that notion of time.  An interesting side application is
a language for succinctly naming a wide range of datatypes."

A little later I noticed that the structures treated there were starting to
look like those in Girard's recent (1986) work on linear logic, and wrote
about that as Section 5 in my CONCUR-92 paper "The Duality of Time and
Information",  http://boole.stanford.edu/pub/dti.pdf.  (I like to think of
Ecclesiastes 9:11, "but time and chance happeneth to them all" as an early
appearance of that duality via Shannon's statistical view of information,
and the bras and kets of quantum mechanics as a later one.)

The idea of orthocurrence (the monoid in a closed monoidal category) as
interaction, and its adjoining closed structure as observation, is spelled
out more explicitly in a talk I gave at an IJCAI'01 workshop on spatial and
temporal reasoning in Seattle in 2001 organized by NSF's Frank Anger.

Slides (cryptic): http://boole.stanford.edu/pub/ijcaitalk.pdf
Paper (detailed): http://boole.stanford.edu/pub/ortho.pdf, unpublished but
later incorporated into
Paper (far more detailed): http://boole.stanford.edu/pub/seqconc.pdf

What got me into all this in the beginning was noticing in the mid-1980s
that in the obvious generalization of ordered time (Pos) to real time
(Met), the closed monoidal structure ceased to be cartesian and the single
operation of orthocurrence now split into two monoids, one closed and the
other cartesian.

That's when I noticed the similarity to Girard's linear logic, which had
made the same split independently and at the same time but for a totally
different application, substructural logic.  The connection was completed
once I'd figured out the duality of time and information as in Ezekiel 9:11.

For Vineet Gupta's thesis in 1991 I suggested choosing between that duality
and cubical complexes as a geometric model of concurrency.  After looking
at both for a month Vineet picked the former.  At POPL'91 Boris
Trakhtenbrot asked me at question time how the two could be connected,
which I was unable to do until realizing (too late for Vineet who'd
finished his thesis by then) that Chu(Set,3) provided the edges, faces,
etc. of the cubical complexes by interpreting 3 as {0, 1/2, 1} with each
face's dimension given by the number of 1/2's (transitions) appearing in it.

Vaughan Pratt


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