Re: The boringness of the dual of exponential

[Patrik Eklund <peklund@cs.umu.se>]

Dear Vaughan,

An excellent remark, once again from your side.

The general audience of this remark may, however, not identify the
subtlety of these states with respect to modelling of parallel programs
and what apparently now happens on clouds and grids with services and
brokers, and not even to mention customers using these services.

So perhaps I may suggest to recall e.g. the dining philosophers
paradigm, which was widely used during the early days of CSP
(Communicating Sequential Processes) decades ago. The philosophers go
through only three states, namely, thinking, getting hungry (and thereby
stop thinking), and eating. After eating then go back to thinking, and so
on. They use chopsticks, one by one (in a very non-Asian fashion), and
communicate about using these resources with fellow philosophers around
the table. Simple objectives are e.g. to avoid starvation.

The relationship between states you mention is much more elaborate, they
overlap, and it is not entirely clear when one state is over, and another
one begins. I would even say that some of these states, in the sense of
being members of a "set of states", call for more structure in underlying
categories.

Perhaps you already thought about transforming this into a new paradigm. I
seriously think it would be a challence to the CSP programmers (some of
them fascinated e.g. by Goguen's institutions!) to encode some behaviour
involving those states in conventional CSP, and making the observation
that we may need additional language constructions, and more
underlying structures. The parallel paradigm is still all too
non-categorical.

Cheers,

Patrik



On Sat, 12 Nov 2011, Vaughan Pratt wrote:

>
> On 11/9/2011 4:45 PM, Jocelyn Ireson-Paine wrote:
>> What's the definition of "weakening"? I've not seen this word used
>> formally.
>
> I had the same question about "boring", which came earlier.  I believe
> "sleeping" comes later, then "dreaming," "awakening," and so on.
> Eventually the lecture ends and we either resume elsewhere with "boring"
> or move on to "eating."
>
> Vaughan

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