In the fifth talk of the ACT@UCR seminar, Gershom Bazerman told how to use locales to study the semantics of dependency, conflict, and concurrency.
Afterwards we discussed his talk at the Category Theory Community Server, here:
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You can see his slides here, or download a video here, or watch the video here:
• Gershom Bazerman, A localic approach to the semantics of dependency, conflict, and concurrency.
Abstract. Petri nets have been of interest to applied category theory for some time. Back in the 1980s, one approach to their semantics was given by algebraic gadgets called “event structures.” We use classical techniques from order theory to study event structures without conflict restrictions (which we term “dependency structures with choice”) by their associated “traces”, which let us establish a one-to-one correspondence between DSCs and a certain class of locales. These locales have an internal logic of reachability, which can be equipped with “versioning” modalities that let us abstract away certain unnecessary detail from an underlying DSC. With this in hand we can give a general notion of what it means to “solve a dependency problem” and combinatorial results bounding the complexity of this. Time permitting, I will sketch work-in-progress which hopes to equip these locales with a notion of conflict, letting us capture the full semantics of general event structures in the form of homological data, thus providing one avenue to the topological semantics of concurrent systems. This is joint work with Raymond Puzio.
