## Azimuth News (Part 5)

11 June, 2016

I’ve been rather quiet about Azimuth projects lately, because I’ve been too busy actually working on them. Here’s some of what’s happening:

Jason Erbele is finishing his thesis, entitled Categories in Control: Applied PROPs. He successfully gave his thesis defense on Wednesday June 8th, but he needs to polish it up some more. Building on the material in our paper “Categories in control”, he’s defined a category where the morphisms are signal flow diagrams. But interestingly, not all the diagrams you can draw are actually considered useful in control theory! So he’s also found a subcategory where the morphisms are the ‘good’ signal flow diagrams, the ones control theorists like. For these he studies familiar concepts like controllability and observability. When his thesis is done I’ll announce it here.

Brendan Fong is also finishing his thesis, called The Algebra of Open and Interconnected Systems. Brendan has already created a powerful formalism for studying open systems: the decorated cospan formalism. We’ve applied it to two examples: electrical circuits and Markov processes. Lately he’s been developing the formalism further, and this will appear in his thesis. Again, I’ll talk about it when he’s done!

Blake Pollard and I are writing a paper called “A compositional framework for open chemical reaction networks”. Here we take our work on Markov processes and throw in two new ingredients: dynamics and nonlinearity. Of course Markov processes have a dynamics, but in our previous paper when we ‘black-boxed’ them to study their external behaviour, we got a relation between flows and populations in equilibrium. Now we explain how to handle nonequilibrium situations as well.

Brandon Coya, Franciscus Rebro and I are writing a paper that might be called “The algebra of networks”. I’m not completely sure of the title, nor who the authors will be: Brendan Fong may also be a coauthor. But the paper explores the technology of PROPs as a tool for describing networks. As an application, we’ll give a new shorter proof of the functoriality of black-boxing for electrical circuits. This new proof also applies to nonlinear circuits. I’m really excited about how the theory of PROPs, first introduced in algebraic topology, is catching fire with all the new applications to network theory.

I expect all these projects to be done by the end of the summer. Near the end of June I’ll go to the Centre for Quantum Technologies, in Singapore. This will be my last summer there. My main job will be to finish up the two papers that I’m supposed to be writing.

There’s another paper that’s already done:

Kenny Courser has written a paper “A bicategory of decorated cospans“, pushing Brendan’s framework from categories to bicategories. I’ll explain this very soon here on this blog! One goal is to understand things like the coarse-graining of open systems: that is, the process of replacing a detailed description by a less detailed description. Since we treat open systems as morphisms, coarse-graining is something that goes from one morphism to another, so it’s naturally treated as a 2-morphism in a bicategory.

So, I’ve got a lot of new ideas to explain here, and I’ll start soon! I also want to get deeper into systems biology.

In the fall I’ve got a couple of short trips lined up:

• Monday November 14 – Friday November 18, 2016 – I’ve been invited by Yoav Kallus to visit the Santa Fe Institute. From the 16th to 18th I’ll attend a workshop on Statistical Physics, Information Processing and Biology.

• Monday December 5 – Friday December 9 – I’ve been invited to Berkeley for a workshop on Compositionality at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, organized by Samson Abramsky, Lucien Hardy, and Michael Mislove. ‘Compositionality’ is a name for how you describe the behavior of a big complicated system in terms of the behaviors of its parts, so this is closely connected to my dream of studying open systems by treating them as morphisms that can be composed to form bigger open systems.

Here’s the announcement:

The compositional description of complex objects is a fundamental feature of the logical structure of computation. The use of logical languages in database theory and in algorithmic and finite model theory provides a basic level of compositionality, but establishing systematic relationships between compositional descriptions and complexity remains elusive. Compositional models of probabilistic systems and languages have been developed, but inferring probabilistic properties of systems in a compositional fashion is an important challenge. In quantum computation, the phenomenon of entanglement poses a challenge at a fundamental level to the scope of compositional descriptions. At the same time, compositionally has been proposed as a fundamental principle for the development of physical theories. This workshop will focus on the common structures and methods centered on compositionality that run through all these areas.

I’ll say more about both these workshops when they take place.

## Programming with Data Flow Graphs

5 June, 2016

Network theory is catching on—in a very practical way!

Google recently started a new open source library called TensorFlow. It’s for software built using data flow graphs. These are graphs where the edges represent tensors—that is, multidimensional arrays of numbers—and the nodes represent operations on tensors. Thus, they are reminiscent of the spin networks used in quantum gravity and gauge theory, or the tensor networks used in renormalization theory. However, I bet the operations involved are nonlinear! If so, they’re more general.

TensorFlow™ is an open source software library for numerical computation using data flow graphs. Nodes in the graph represent mathematical operations, while the graph edges represent the multidimensional data arrays (tensors) communicated between them. The flexible architecture allows you to deploy computation to one or more CPUs or GPUs in a desktop, server, or mobile device with a single API. TensorFlow was originally developed by researchers and engineers working on the Google Brain Team within Google’s Machine Intelligence research organization for the purposes of conducting machine learning and deep neural networks research, but the system is general enough to be applicable in a wide variety of other domains as well.

### What is a Data Flow Graph?

Data flow graphs describe mathematical computation with a directed graph of nodes & edges. Nodes typically implement mathematical operations, but can also represent endpoints to feed in data, push out results, or read/write persistent variables. Edges describe the input/output relationships between nodes. These data edges carry dynamically-sized multidimensional data arrays, or tensors. The flow of tensors through the graph is where TensorFlow gets its name. Nodes are assigned to computational devices and execute asynchronously and in parallel once all the tensors on their incoming edges becomes available.

### TensorFlow Features

Deep Flexibility. TensorFlow isn’t a rigid neural networks library. If you can express your computation as a data flow graph, you can use TensorFlow. You construct the graph, and you write the inner loop that drives computation. We provide helpful tools to assemble subgraphs common in neural networks, but users can write their own higher-level libraries on top of TensorFlow. Defining handy new compositions of operators is as easy as writing a Python function and costs you nothing in performance. And if you don’t see the low-level data operator you need, write a bit of C++ to add a new one.

True Portability. TensorFlow runs on CPUs or GPUs, and on desktop, server, or mobile computing platforms. Want to play around with a machine learning idea on your laptop without need of any special hardware? TensorFlow has you covered. Ready to scale-up and train that model faster on GPUs with no code changes? TensorFlow has you covered. Want to deploy that trained model on mobile as part of your product? TensorFlow has you covered. Changed your mind and want to run the model as a service in the cloud? Containerize with Docker and TensorFlow just works.

Connect Research and Production. Gone are the days when moving a machine learning idea from research to product require a major rewrite. At Google, research scientists experiment with new algorithms in TensorFlow, and product teams use TensorFlow to train and serve models live to real customers. Using TensorFlow allows industrial researchers to push ideas to products faster, and allows academic researchers to share code more directly and with greater scientific reproducibility.

Auto-Differentiation. Gradient based machine learning algorithms will benefit from TensorFlow’s automatic differentiation capabilities. As a TensorFlow user, you define the computational architecture of your predictive model, combine that with your objective function, and just add data — TensorFlow handles computing the derivatives for you. Computing the derivative of some values w.r.t. other values in the model just extends your graph, so you can always see exactly what’s going on.

Language Options. TensorFlow comes with an easy to use Python interface and a no-nonsense C++ interface to build and execute your computational graphs. Write stand-alone TensorFlow Python or C++ programs, or try things out in an interactive TensorFlow iPython notebook where you can keep notes, code, and visualizations logically grouped. This is just the start though — we’re hoping to entice you to contribute SWIG interfaces to your favorite language — be it Go, Java, Lua, JavaScript, or R.

Maximize Performance. Want to use every ounce of muscle in that workstation with 32 CPU cores and 4 GPU cards? With first-class support for threads, queues, and asynchronous computation, TensorFlow allows you to make the most of your available hardware. Freely assign compute elements of your TensorFlow graph to different devices, and let TensorFlow handle the copies.

### Who Can Use TensorFlow?

TensorFlow is for everyone. It’s for students, researchers, hobbyists, hackers, engineers, developers, inventors and innovators and is being open sourced under the Apache 2.0 open source license.

TensorFlow is not complete; it is intended to be built upon and extended. We have made an initial release of the source code, and continue to work actively to make it better. We hope to build an active open source community that drives the future of this library, both by providing feedback and by actively contributing to the source code.

### Why Did Google Open Source This?

If TensorFlow is so great, why open source it rather than keep it proprietary? The answer is simpler than you might think: We believe that machine learning is a key ingredient to the innovative products and technologies of the future. Research in this area is global and growing fast, but lacks standard tools. By sharing what we believe to be one of the best machine learning toolboxes in the world, we hope to create an open standard for exchanging research ideas and putting machine learning in products. Google engineers really do use TensorFlow in user-facing products and services, and our research group intends to share TensorFlow implementations along side many of our research publications.

For more details, try this:

## Interview (Part 2)

21 March, 2016

Greg Bernhardt runs an excellent website for discussing physics, math and other topics, called Physics Forums. He recently interviewed me there. Since I used this opportunity to explain a bit about the Azimuth Project and network theory, I thought I’d reprint the interview here. Here is Part 2.

Tell us about your experience with past projects like “This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics”.

I was hired by U.C. Riverside back in 1989. I was lonely and bored, since Lisa was back on the other coast. So, I spent a lot of evenings on the computer.

We had the internet back then—this was shortly after stone tools were invented—but the world-wide web hadn’t caught on yet. So, I would read and write posts on “newsgroups” using a program called a “news server”. You have to imagine me sitting in front of an old green­-on­-black cathode ray tube monitor with a large floppy disk drive, firing up the old modem to hook up to the internet.

In 1993, I started writing a series of posts on the papers I’d read. I called it “This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics”, which was a big mistake, because I couldn’t really write one every week. After a while I started using it to explain lots of topics in math and physics. I wrote 300 issues. Then I quit in 2010, when I started taking climate change seriously.

Share with us a bit about your current projects like Azimuth and the n­-Café.

The n­-Category Café is a blog I started with Urs Schreiber and the philosopher David Corfield back in 2006, when all three of us realized that n­-categories are the big wave that math is riding right now. We have a bunch more bloggers on the team now. But the n­-Café lost some steam when I quit work in n­-categories and Urs started putting most of his energy into two related projects: a wiki called the nLab and a discussion group called the nForum.

In 2010, when I noticed that global warming was like a huge wave crashing down on our civilization, I started the Azimuth Project. The goal was to create a focal point for scientists and engineers interested in saving the planet. It consists of a team of people, a blog, a wiki and a discussion group. It was very productive for a while: we wrote a lot of educational articles on climate science and energy issues. But lately I’ve realized I’m better at abstract math. So, I’ve been putting more time into working with my grad students.

Around 2004 I started hearing news that sent chills up my spine ­ and what really worried me is how few people were talking about this news, at least in the US.

I’m talking about how we’re pushing the Earth’s climate out of the glacial cycle we’ve been in for over a million years, into brand new territory. I’m talking about things like how it takes hundreds or thousands of years for CO2 to exit the atmosphere after it’s been put in. And I’m talking about how global warming is just part of a bigger phenomenon: the Anthropocene. That’s a new geological epoch, in which the biosphere is rapidly changing due to human influences. It’s not just the temperature:

• About 1/4 of all chemical energy produced by plants is now used by humans.

• The rate of species going extinct is 100­–1000 times the usual background rate.

• Populations of large ocean fish have declined 90% since 1950.

• Humans now take more nitrogen from the atmosphere and convert it into nitrates than all other processes combined.

8­-9 times as much phosphorus is flowing into oceans than the natural background rate.

This doesn’t necessarily spell the end of our civilization, but it is something that we’ll all have to deal with.

So, I felt the need to alert people and try to dream up strategies to do something. That’s why in 2010 I quit work on n­-categories and started the Azimuth Project.

You have life experience on both US coasts. Which do you prefer and why?

There are some differences between the coasts, but they’re fairly minor. The West Coast is part of the Pacific Rim, so there’s more Asian influence here. The seasons are less pronounced here, because winds in the northern hemisphere blow from west to east, and the oceans serve as a temperature control system. Down south in Riverside it’s a semi­-desert, so we can eat breakfast in our back yard in January! But I live here not because I like the West Coast more. This just happens to be where my wife Lisa and I managed to get a job.

What I really like is getting out of the US and seeing the rest of the world. When you’re at cremation ritual in Bali, or a Hmong festival in Laos, the difference between regions of the US starts seeming pretty small.

But I wasn’t a born traveler. When I spent my first summer in England, I was very apprehensive about making a fool of myself. The British have different manners, and their old universities are full of arcane customs and subtle social distinctions that even the British find terrifying. But after a few summers there I got over it. First, all around the world, being American gives you a license to be clueless. If you behave any better than the worst stereotypes, people are impressed. Second, I spend most of my time with mathematicians, who are incredibly forgiving of bad social behavior as long as you know interesting theorems.

By now I’ve gotten to feel very comfortable in England. The last couple of years I’ve spent time at the quantum computation group at Oxford–the group run by Bob Coecke and Samson Abramsky. I like talking to Jamie Vicary about n­categories and physics, and also my old friend Minhyong Kim, who is a number theorist there.

I was also very apprehensive when I first visited Paris. Everyone talks about how the waiters are rude, and so on. But I think that’s an exaggeration. Yes, if you go to cafés packed with boorish tourists, the waiters will treat you like a boorish tourist—so don’t do that. If you go to quieter places and behave politely, most people are friendly. Luckily Lisa speaks French and has some friends in Paris; that opens up a lot of opportunities. I don’t speak French, so I always feel like a bit of an idiot, but I’ve learned to cope. I’ve spent a few summers there working with Paul­-André Melliès on category theory and logic.

Yau Ma Tei Market – Hong Kong

I was also intimidated when I first spent a summer in Hong Kong—and even more so when I spent a summer in Shanghai. Lisa speaks Chinese too: she’s more cultured than me, and she drags me to interesting places. My first day walking around Shanghai left me completely exhausted: everything was new! Walking down the street you see people selling frogs in a bucket, strange fungi and herbs, then a little phone shop where telephone numbers with lots of 8’s cost more, and so on: it’s a kind of cognitive assault.

But again, I came to enjoy it. And coming back to California, everything seemed a bit boring. Why is there so much land that’s not being used? Where are all the people? Why is the food so bland?

I’ve spent the most time outside the US in Singapore. Again, that’s because my wife and I both got job offers there, not because it’s the best place in the world. Compared to China it’s rather sterile and manicured. But it’s still a fascinating place. They’ve pulled themselves up from a British colonial port town to a multi­cultural country that’s in some ways more technologically advanced than the US. The food is great: it’s a mix of Chinese, Indian, Malay and pretty much everything else. There’s essentially no crime: you can walk around in the darkest alley in the worst part of town at 3 am and still feel safe. It’s interesting to live in a country where people from very different cultures are learning to live together and prosper. The US considers itself a melting-pot, but in Singapore they have four national languages: English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil.

Most of all, it’s great to live in places where the culture and politics is different than where I grew up. But I’m trying to travel less, because it’s bad for the planet.

You’ve gained some fame for your “crackpot index”. What were your motivations for developing it? Any new criteria you’d add?

After the internet first caught on, a bunch of us started using it to talk about physics on the usenet newsgroup sci.physics.

And then, all of a sudden, crackpots around the world started joining in!

Before this, I don’t think anybody realized how many people had their own personal theories of physics. You might have a crazy uncle who spent his time trying to refute special relativity, but you didn’t realize there were actually thousands of these crazy uncles.

As I’m sure you know here at Physics Forums, crackpots naturally tend to drive out more serious conversations. If you have some people talking about the laws of black hole thermodynamics, and some guy jumps in and says that the universe is a black hole, everyone will drop what they’re doing and argue with that guy. It’s irresistible. It reminds me of how when someone brings a baby to a party, everyone will start cooing to the baby. But it’s worse.

When physics crackpots started taking over the usenet newsgroup sci.physics, I discovered that they had a lot of features in common. The Crackpot Index summarizes these common features. Whenever I notice a new pattern, I add it.

For example: if someone starts comparing themselves to Galileo and says the physics establishment is going after them like the Inquisition, I guarantee you that they’re a crackpot. Their theories could be right—but unfortunately, they’ve got delusions of grandeur and a persecution complex.

It’s not being wrong that makes someone a crackpot. Being a full­-fledged crackpot is the endpoint of a tragic syndrome. Someone starts out being a bit too confident that they can revolutionize physics without learning it first. In fact, many young physicists go through this stage! But the good ones react to criticism by upping their game. The ones who become crackpots just brush it off. They come up with an idea that they think is great, and when nobody likes it, they don’t say “okay, I need to learn more.” Instead, they make up excuses: nobody understands me, maybe there’s a conspiracy at work, etc. The excuses get more complicated with each rebuff, and it gets harder and harder for them to back down and say “whoops, I was wrong”.

When I wrote the Crackpot Index, I thought crackpots were funny. Alexander Abian claimed all the world’s ills would be cured if we blew up the Moon. Archimedes Plutonium thinks the Universe is a giant plutonium atom. These ideas are funny. But now I realize how sad it is that someone can start with an passion for physics and end up in this kind of trap. They almost never escape.

Who are some of your math and physics heroes of the past and of today?

Wow, that’s a big question! I think every scientist needs to have heroes. I’ve had a lot.

Marie Curie

When I was a kid, I was in love with Marie Curie. I wanted to marry a woman like her: someone who really cared about science. She overcame huge obstacles to get a degree in physics, discovered not one but two new elements, often doing experiments in her own kitchen—and won not one but two Nobel prizes. She was a tragic figure in many ways. Her beloved husband Pierre, a great physicist in his own right, slipped and was run over by a horse­-drawn cart, dying instantly when the wheels ran over his skull. She herself probably died from her experiments with radiation. But this made me love her all the more.

Later my big hero was Einstein. How could any physicist not have Einstein as a hero? First he came up with the idea that light comes in discrete quanta: photons. Then, two months later, he used Brownian motion to figure out the size of atoms. One month after that: special relativity, unifying space and time! Three months later, the equivalence between mass and energy. And all this was just a warmup for his truly magnificent theory of general relativity, explaining gravity as the curvature of space and time. He truly transformed our vision of the Universe. And then, in his later years, the noble and unsuccessful search for a unified field theory. As a friend of mine put it, what matters here is not that he failed: what matters is that he set physics a new goal, more ambitious than any goal it had before.

Later it was Feynman. As I mentioned, my uncle gave me Feynman’s Lectures on Physics. This is how I first learned Maxwell’s equations, special relativity, quantum mechanics. His way of explaining things with a minimum of jargon, getting straight to the heart of every issue, is something I really admire. Later I enjoyed his books like Surely You Must Be Joking. Still later I learned enough to be impressed by his work on QED.

But when you read his autobiographical books, you can see that he was a bit too obsessed with pretending to be a fun­-loving ordinary guy. A fun­-loving ordinary guy who just happens to be smarter than everyone else. In short, a self­-absorbed showoff. He could also be pretty mean to women—and in that respect, Einstein was even worse. So our heroes should not be admired uncritically.

Alexander Grothendieck

A good example is Alexander Grothendieck. I guess he’s my main math hero these days. To solve concrete problems like the Weil conjectures, he avoided brute force techniques and instead developed revolutionary new concepts that gently dissolved those problems. And these new concepts turned out to be much more important than the problems that motivated him. I’m talking about abelian categories, schemes, topoi, stacks, things like that. Everyone who really wants to understand math at a deep level has got to learn these concepts. They’re beautiful and wonderfully simple—but not easy to master. You have to really change your world view to understand them, just like general relativity or quantum mechanics. You have to rewire your neurons.

At his peak, Grothendieck seemed almost superhuman. It seems he worked almost all day and all night, bouncing his ideas off the other amazing French algebraic geometers. Apparently 20,000 pages of his writings remain unpublished! But he became increasingly alienated from the mathematical establishment and eventually disappeared completely, hiding in a village near the Pyrenees.

Which groundbreaking advances in science and math are you most looking forward to?

I’d really like to see progress in figuring out the fundamental laws of physics. Ideally, I’d like to know the Theory of Everything. Of course, we don’t even know that there is one! There could be an endless succession of deeper and deeper realizations to be had about the laws of physics, with no final answer.

If we ever do discover the Theory of Everything, that won’t be the end of the story. It could be just the beginning. For example, next we could ask why this particular theory governs our Universe. Is it necessary, or contingent? People like to chat about this puzzle already, but I think it’s premature. I think we should find the Theory of Everything first.

Unfortunately, right now fundamental physics is in a phase of being “stuck”. I don’t expect to see the Theory of Everything in my lifetime. I’d be happy to see any progress at all! There are dozens of very basic things we don’t understand.

When it comes to math, I expect that people will have their hands full this century redoing the foundations using ∞-categories, and answering some of the questions that come up when you do this. The crowd working on “homotopy type theory” is making good progress–but so far they’re mainly thinking about ∞-groupoids, which are a very special sort of ∞-category. When we do all of math using ∞-categories, it will be a whole new ballgame.

And then there’s the question of whether humanity will figure out a way to keep from ruining the planet we live on. And the question of whether we’ll succeed in replacing ourselves with something more intelligent—or even wiser.

The Milky Way and Andromeda Nebula after their first collision, 4 billion years from now

Here’s something cool: red dwarf stars will keep burning for 10 trillion years. If we, or any civilization, can settle down next to one of those, there will be plenty of time to figure things out. That’s what I hope for.

But some of my friends think that life always uses up resources as fast as possible. So one of my big questions is whether intelligent life will develop the patience to sit around and think interesting thoughts, or whether it will burn up red dwarf stars and every other source of energy as fast as it can, as we’re doing now with fossil fuels.

What does the future hold for John Baez? What are your goals?

What the future holds for me, primarily, is death.

That’s true of all of us—or at least most of us. While some hope that technology will bring immortality, or at least a much longer life, I bet most of us are headed for death fairly soon. So I try to make the most of the time I have.

I’m always re­-evaluating what I should do. I used to spend time thinking about quantum gravity and n­-categories. But quantum gravity feels stuck, and n­-category theory is shooting forward so fast that my help is no longer needed.

Climate change is hugely important, and nobody really knows what to do about it. Lots of people are trying lots of different things. Unfortunately I’m no better than the rest when it comes to the most obvious strategies—like politics, or climate science, or safer nuclear reactors, or better batteries and photocells.

The trick is finding things you can do better than other people. Right now for me that means thinking about networks and biology in a very abstract way. I’m inspired by this remark by Patten and Witkamp:

To understand ecosystems, ultimately will be to understand networks.

So that’s my goal for the next five years or so. It’s probably not be the best thing anyone can do to prepare for the Middle Anthropocene. But it may be the best thing I can do: use the math I know to help people understand the biosphere.

It may seem like I keep jumping around: from quantum gravity to n-categories to biology. But I keep wanting to think about networks, and how they change in time.

At some point I hope to retire and become a bit more of a self­-indulgent wastrel. I could write a fun book about group theory in geometry and physics, and a fun book about the octonions. I might even get around to spending more time on music!

John Baez

## Interview (Part 1)

18 March, 2016

Greg Bernhardt runs an excellent website for discussing physics, math and other topics, called Physics Forums. He recently interviewed me there. Since I used this opportunity to explain a bit about the Azimuth Project and network theory, I thought I’d reprint the interview here. Here is Part 1.

Give us some background on yourself.

I’m interested in all kinds of mathematics and physics, so I call myself a mathematical physicist. But I’m a math professor at the University of California in Riverside. I’ve taught here since 1989. My wife Lisa Raphals got a job here nine years later: among other things, she studies classical Chinese and Greek philosophy.

I got my bachelors’s degree in math at Princeton. I did my undergrad thesis on whether you can use a computer to solve Schrödinger’s equation to arbitrary accuracy. In the end, it became obvious that you can. I was really interested in mathematical logic, and I used some in my thesis—the theory of computable functions—but I decided it wasn’t very helpful in physics. When I read the magnificently poetic last chapter of Misner, Thorne and Wheeler’s Gravitation, I decided that quantum gravity was the problem to work on.

I went to math grad school at MIT, but I didn’t find anyone to work with on quantum gravity. So, I did my thesis on quantum field theory with Irving Segal. He was one of the founders of “constructive quantum field theory”, where you try to rigorously prove that quantum field theories make mathematical sense and obey certain axioms that they should. This was a hard subject, and I didn’t accomplish much, but I learned a lot.

I got a postdoc at Yale and switched to classical field theory, mainly because it was something I could do. On the side I was still trying to understand quantum gravity. String theory was bursting into prominence at the time, and my life would have been easier if I’d jumped onto that bandwagon. But I didn’t like it, because most of the work back then studied strings moving on a fixed “background” spacetime. Quantum gravity is supposed to be about how the geometry of spacetime is variable and quantum­-mechanical, so I didn’t want a theory of quantum gravity set on a pre­-existing background geometry!

I got a professorship at U.C. Riverside based on my work on classical field theory. But at a conference on that subject in Seattle, I heard Abhay Ashtekar, Chris Isham and Renate Loll give some really interesting talks on loop quantum gravity. I don’t know why they gave those talks at a conference on classical field theory. But I’m sure glad they did! I liked their work because it was background­-free and mathematically rigorous. So I started work on loop quantum gravity.

Like many other theories, quantum gravity is easier in low dimensions. I became interested in how category theory lets you formulate quantum gravity in a universe with just 3 spacetime dimensions. It amounts to a radical new conception of space, where the geometry is described in a thoroughly quantum­-mechanical way. Ultimately, space is a quantum superposition of “spin networks”, which are like Feynman diagrams. The idea is roughly that a spin network describes a virtual process where particles move around and interact. If we know how likely each of these processes is, we know the geometry of space.

A spin network

Loop quantum gravity tries to do the same thing for full­-fledged quantum gravity in 4 spacetime dimensions, but it doesn’t work as well. Then Louis Crane had an exciting idea: maybe 4­-dimensional quantum gravity needs a more sophisticated structure: a “2­-category”.

I had never heard of 2­-categories. Category theory is about things and processes that turn one thing into another. In a 2­-category we also have “meta-processes” that turn one process into another.

I became very excited about 2-­categories. At the time I was so dumb I didn’t consider the possibility of 3­-categories, and 4­-categories, and so on. To be precise, I was more of a mathematical physicist than a mathematician: I wasn’t trying to develop math for its own sake. Then someone named James Dolan told me about n­-categories! That was a real eye­-opener. He came to U.C. Riverside to work with me. So I started thinking about n­-categories in parallel with loop quantum gravity.

Dolan was technically my grad student, but I probably learned more from him than vice versa. In 1996 we wrote a paper called “Higher­-dimensional algebra and topological quantum field theory”, which might be my best paper. It’s full of grandiose guesses about n-­categories and their connections to other branches of math and physics. We had this vision of how everything fit together. It was so beautiful, with so much evidence supporting it, that we knew it had to be true. Unfortunately, at the time nobody had come up with a good definition of n­-category, except for n < 4. So we called our guesses “hypotheses” instead of “conjectures”. In math a conjecture should be something utterly precise: it’s either true or not, with no room for interpretation.

By now, I think everybody more or less believes our hypotheses. Some of the easier ones have already been turned into theorems. Jacob Lurie, a young hotshot at Harvard, improved the statement of one and wrote a 111-page outline of a proof. Unfortunately he still used some concepts that hadn’t been defined. People are working to fix that, and I feel sure they’ll succeed.

A foam of soap bubbles

Anyway, I kept trying to connect these ideas to quantum gravity. In 1997, I introduced “spin foams”. These are structures like spin networks, but with an extra dimension. Spin networks have vertices and edges. Spin foams also have 2­-dimensional faces: imagine a foam of soap bubbles.

The idea was to use spin foams to give a purely quantum­-mechanical description of the geometry of spacetime, just as spin networks describe the geometry of space. But mathematically, what we’re doing here is going from a category to a 2­-category.

By now, there are a number of different theories of quantum gravity based on spin foams. Unfortunately, it’s not clear that any of them really work. In 2002, Dan Christensen, Greg Egan and I did a bunch of supercomputer calculations to study this question. We showed that the most popular spin foam theory at the time gave dramatically different answers than people had hoped for. I think we more or less killed that theory.

That left me rather depressed. I don’t enjoy programming: indeed, Christensen and Egan did all the hard work of that sort on our paper. I didn’t want to spend years sifting through spin foam theories to find one that works. And most of all, I didn’t want to end up as an old man still not knowing if my work had been worthwhile! To me n­-category theory was clearly the math of the future—and it was easy for me to come up with cool new ideas in that subject. So, I quit quantum gravity and switched to n­-categories.

But this was very painful. Quantum gravity is a kind of “holy grail” in physics. When you work on that subject, you wind up talking to lots of people who believe that unifying quantum mechanics and general relativity is the most important thing in the world, and that nothing else could possibly be as interesting. You wind up believing it. It took me years to get out of that mindset.

Ironically, when I quit quantum gravity, I felt free to explore string theory. As a branch of math, it’s really wonderful. I started looking at how n­-categories apply to string theory. It turns out there’s a wonderful story here: briefly, particles are to categories as strings are to 2­-categories, and all the math of particles can be generalized to strings using this idea! I worked out a bit of this story with Urs Schreiber and John Huerta.

Around 2010, I felt I had to switch to working on environmental issues and math related to engineering and biology, for the sake of the planet. That was another painful renunciation. But luckily, Urs Schreiber and others are continuing to work on n­-categories and string theory, and doing it better than I ever could. So I don’t feel the need to work on those things anymore—indeed, it would be hard to keep up. I just follow along quietly from the sidelines.

It’s quite possible that we need a dozen more good ideas before we really get anywhere on quantum gravity. But I feel confident that n­-categories will have a role to play. So, I’m happy to have helped push that subject forward.

Your uncle, Albert Baez, was a physicist. How did he help develop your interests?

He had a huge effect on me. He’s mainly famous for being the father of the folk singer Joan Baez. But he started out in optics and helped invent the first X­-ray microscope. Later he became very involved in physics education, especially in what were then called third­-world countries. For example, in 1951 he helped set up a physics department at the University of Baghdad.

Albert V. Baez

When I was a kid he worked for UNESCO, so he’d come to Washington D.C. and stay with my parents, who lived nearby. Whenever he showed up, he would open his suitcase and pull out amazing gadgets: diffraction gratings, holograms, and things like that. And he would explain how they work! I decided physics was the coolest thing there is.

When I was eight, he gave me a copy of his book The New College Physics: A Spiral Approach. I immediately started trying to read it. The “spiral approach” is a great pedagogical principle: instead of explaining each topic just once, you should start off easy and then keep spiraling around from topic to topic, examining them in greater depth each time you revisit them. So he not only taught me physics, he taught me about how to learn and how to teach.

Later, when I was fifteen, I spent a couple weeks at his apartment in Berkeley. He showed me the Lawrence Hall of Science, which is where I got my first taste of programming—in BASIC, with programs stored on paper tape. This was in 1976. He also gave me a copy of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. And so, the following summer, when I was working at a state park building trails and such, I was also trying to learn quantum mechanics from the third volume of The Feynman Lectures. The other kids must have thought I was a complete geek—which of course I was.

Give us some insight on what your average work day is like.

During the school year I teach two or three days a week. On days when I teach, that’s the focus of my day: I try to prepare my classes starting at breakfast. Teaching is lots of fun for me. Right now I’m teaching two courses: an undergraduate course on game theory and a graduate course on category theory. I’m also running a seminar on category theory. In addition, I meet with my graduate students for a four­-hour session once a week: they show me what they’ve done, and we try to push our research projects forward.

On days when I don’t teach, I spend a lot of time writing. I love blogging, so I could easily do that all day, but I try to spend a lot of time writing actual papers. Any given paper starts out being tough to write, but near the end it practically writes itself. At the end, I have to tear myself away from it: I keep wanting to add more. At that stage, I feel an energetic glow at the end of a good day spent writing. Few things are so satisfying.

During the summer I don’t teach, so I can get a lot of writing done. I spent two years doing research at the Centre of Quantum Technologies, which is in Singapore, and since 2012 I’ve been working there during summers. Sometimes I bring my grad students, but mostly I just write.

I also spend plenty of time doing things with my wife, like talking, cooking, shopping, and working out at the gym. We like to watch TV shows in the evening, mainly mysteries and science fiction.

We also do a lot of gardening. When I was younger that seemed boring ­ but as you get older, subjective time speeds up, so you pay more attention to things like plants growing. There’s something tremendously satisfying about planting a small seedling, watching it grow into an orange tree, and eating its fruit for breakfast.

I love playing the piano and recording electronic music, but doing it well requires big blocks of time, which I don’t always have. Music is pure delight, and if I’m not listening to it I’m usually composing it in my mind.

If I gave in to my darkest urges and becames a decadent wastrel I might spend all day blogging, listening to music, recording music and working on pure math. But I need other things to stay sane.

What research are you working on at the moment?

Lately I’ve been trying to finish a paper called “Struggles with the Continuum”. It’s about the problems physics has with infinities, due to the assumption that spacetime is a continuum. At certain junctures this paper became psychologically difficult to write, since it’s supposed to include a summary of quantum field theory, which is complicated and sprawling subject. So, I’ve resorted to breaking this paper into blog articles and posting them on Physics Forums, just to motivate myself.

Purely for fun, I’ve been working with Greg Egan on some projects involving the octonions. The octonions are a number system where you can add, subtract, multiply and divide. Such number systems only exist in 1, 2, 4, and 8 dimensions: you’ve got the real numbers, which form a line, the complex numbers, which form a plane, the quaternions, which are 4­-dimensional, and the octonions, which are 8­dimensional. The octonions are the biggest, but also the weirdest. For example, multiplication of octonions violates the associative law: (xy)z is not equal to x(yz). So the octonions sound completely crazy at first, but they turn out to have fascinating connections to string theory and other things. They’re pretty addictive, and if became a decadent wastrel I would spend a lot more time on them.

The 240 unit integral octonions, projected onto a plane

There’s a concept of “integer” for the octonions, and integral octonions form a lattice, a repeating pattern of points, in 8 dimensions. This is called the E8 lattice. There’s another lattices that lives in in 24 dimensions, called the “Leech lattice”. Both are connected to string theory. Notice that 8+2 equals 10, the dimension superstrings like to live in, and 24+2 equals 26, the dimension bosonic strings like to live in. That’s not a coincidence! The 2 here comes from the 2­-dimensional world-sheet of the string.

Since 3×8 is 24, Egan and I became interested in how you could built the Leech lattice from 3 copies of the E8 lattice. People already knew a trick for doing it, but it took us a while to understand how it worked—and then Egan showed you could do this trick in exactly 17,280 ways! I want to write up the proof. There’s a lot of beautiful geometry here.

There’s something really exhilarating about struggling to reach the point where you have some insight into these structures and how they’re connected to physics.

My main work, though, involves using category theory to study networks. I’m interested in networks of all kinds, from electrical circuits to neural networks to “chemical reaction networks” and many more. Different branches of science and engineering focus on different kinds of networks. But there’s not enough communication between researchers in different subjects, so it’s up to mathematicians to set up a unified theory of networks.

I’ve got seven grad students working on this project—or actually eight, if you count Brendan Fong: I’ve been helping him on his dissertation, but he’s actually a student at Oxford.

Brendan was the first to join the project. I wanted him to work on electrical circuits, which are a nice familiar kind of network, a good starting point. But he went much deeper: he developed a general category­-theoretic framework for studying networks. We then applied it to electrical circuits, and other things as well.

Blake Pollard and Brendan Fong at the Centre for Quantum Technologies

Blake Pollard is a student of mine in the physics department here at U. C. Riverside. Together with Brendan and me, he developed a category­-theoretic approach to Markov processes: random processes where a system hops around between different states. We used Brendan’s general formalism to reduce Markov processes to electrical circuits. Now Blake is going further and using these ideas to tackle chemical reaction networks.

My other students are in the math department at U. C. Riverside. Jason Erbele is working on “control theory”, a branch of engineering where you try to design feedback loops to make sure processes run in a stable way. Control theory uses networks called “signal flow diagrams”, and Jason has worked out how to understand these using category theory.

Signal flow diagram for an inverted pendulum on a cart

Jason isn’t using Brendan’s framework: he’s using a different one, called PROPs, which were developed a long time ago for use in algebraic topology. My student Franciscus Rebro has been developing it further, for use in our project. It gives a nice way to describe networks in terms of their basic building blocks. It also illuminates the similarity between signal flow diagrams and Feynman diagrams! They’re very similar, but there’s a big difference: in signal flow diagrams the signals are classical, while Feynman diagrams are quantum­-mechanical.

My student Brandon Coya has been working on electrical circuits. He’s sort of continuing what Brendan started, and unifying Brendan’s formalism with PROPs.

My student Adam Yassine is starting to work on networks in classical mechanics. In classical mechanics you usually consider a single system: you write down the Hamiltonian, you get the equations of motion, and you try to solve them. He’s working on a setup where you can take lots of systems and hook them up into a network.

My students Kenny Courser and Daniel Cicala are digging deeper into another aspect of network theory. As I hinted earlier, a category is about things and processes that turn one thing into another. In a 2­-category we also have “meta-processes” that turn one process into another. We’re starting to bring 2­-categories into network theory.

For example, you can use categories to describe an electrical circuit as a process that turns some inputs into some outputs. You put some currents in one end and some currents come out the other end. But you can also use 2­-categories to describe “meta-processes” that turn one electrical circuit into another. An example of a meta-process would be a way of simplifying an electrical circuit, like replacing two resistors in series by a single resistor.

Ultimately I want to push these ideas in the direction of biochemistry. Biology seems complicated and “messy” to physicists and mathematicians, but I think there must be a beautiful logic to it. It’s full of networks, and these networks change with time. So, 2­-categories seem like a natural language for biology.

It won’t be easy to convince people of this, but that’s okay.

## Network Calculus

14 March, 2016

If anyone here can go to this talk and report back, I’d be most grateful! I just heard about it from Jamie Vicary.

Jens Schmitt, Network calculus, Thursday 17 March 2016, 10:00 am, Tony Hoare Room, Robert Hooke Building, the University of Oxford.

Abstract. This talk is about Network Calculus: a recent methodology to provide performance guarantees in concurrent programs, digital circuits, and communication networks. There is a deterministic and a stochastic version of network calculus, providing worst-case and probabilistic guarantees, respectively. The deterministic network calculus has been developed in the last 25 years and is somewhat a settled methodology; the stochastic network calculus is ten years younger and while some of the dust has settled there are still many open fundamental research questions. For both, the key innovation over existing methods is that they work with bounds on the arrival and service processes of the system under analysis. This often enables dealing with complex systems where conventional methods become intractable—of course at a loss of exact results, but still with rigorous performance bounds.

## Corelations in Network Theory

2 February, 2016

Category theory reduces a large chunk of math to the clever manipulation of arrows. One of the fun things about this is that you can often take a familiar mathematical construction, think of it category-theoretically, and just turn around all the arrows to get something new and interesting!

In math we love functions. If we have a function

$f: X \to Y$

we can formally turn around the arrow to think of $f$ as something going back from $Y$ back to $X$. But this something is usually not a function: it’s called a ‘cofunction’. A cofunction from $Y$ to $X$ is simply a function from $X$ to $Y.$

Cofunctions are somewhat interesting, but they’re really just functions viewed through a looking glass, so they don’t give much new—at least, not by themselves.

The game gets more interesting if we think of functions and cofunctions as special sorts of relations. A relation from $X$ to $Y$ is a subset

$R \subseteq X \times Y$

It’s a function when for each $x \in X$ there’s a unique $y \in Y$ with $(x,y) \in R.$ It’s a cofunction when for each $y \in Y$ there’s a unique $x \in x$ with $(x,y) \in R.$

Just as we can compose functions, we can compose relations. Relations have certain advantages over functions: for example, we can ‘turn around’ any relation $R$ from $X$ to $Y$ and get a relation $R^\dagger$ from $Y$ to $X:$

$R^\dagger = \{(y,x) : \; (x,y) \in R \}$

If we turn around a function we get a cofunction, and vice versa. But we can also do other fun things: for example, since both functions and cofunctions are relations, we can compose a function and a cofunction and get a relation.

Of course, relations also have certain disadvantages compared to functions. But it’s utterly clear by now that the category $\mathrm{FinRel},$ where the objects are finite sets and the morphisms are relations, is very important.

So far, so good. But what happens if we take the definition of ‘relation’ and turn all the arrows around?

There are actually several things I could mean by this question, some more interesting than others. But one of them gives a very interesting new concept: the concept of ‘corelation’. And two of my students have just written a very nice paper on corelations:

• Brandon Coya and Brendan Fong, Corelations are the prop for extraspecial commutative Frobenius monoids.

Here’s why this paper is important for network theory: corelations between finite sets are exactly what we need to describe electrical circuits made of ideal conductive wires! A corelation from a finite set $X$ to a finite set $Y$ can be drawn this way:

I have drawn more wires than strictly necessary: I’ve drawn a wire between two points whenever I want current to be able to flow between them. But there’s a reason I did this: a corelation from $X$ to $Y$ simply tells us when current can flow from one point in either of these sets to any other point in these sets.

Of course circuits made solely of conductive wires are not very exciting for electrical engineers. But in an earlier paper, Brendan introduced corelations as an important stepping-stone toward more general circuits:

• John Baez and Brendan Fong, A compositional framework for passive linear circuits. (Blog article here.)

The key point is simply that you use conductive wires to connect resistors, inductors, capacitors, batteries and the like and build interesting circuits—so if you don’t fully understand the math of conductive wires, you’re limited in your ability to understand circuits in general!

In their new paper, Brendan teamed up with Brandon Coya, and they figured out all the rules obeyed by the category $\mathrm{FinCorel},$ where the objects are finite sets and the morphisms are corelations. I’ll explain these rules later.

This sort of analysis had previously been done for $\mathrm{FinRel},$ and it turns out there’s a beautiful analogy between the two cases! Here is a chart displaying the analogy:

 Spans Cospans extra bicommutative bimonoids special commutative Frobenius monoids Relations Corelations extraspecial bicommutative bimonoids extraspecial commutative Frobenius monoids

I’m sure this will be cryptic to the nonmathematicians reading this, and even many mathematicians—but the paper explains what’s going on here.

I’ll actually say what an ‘extraspecial commutative Frobenius monoid’ is later in this post. This is a terse way of listing all the rules obeyed by corelations between finite sets—and thus, all the rules obeyed by conductive wires.

But first, let’s talk about something simpler.

### What is a corelation?

Just as we can define functions as relations of a special sort, we can also define relations in terms of functions. A relation from $X$ to $Y$ is a subset

$R \subseteq X \times Y$

but we can think of this as an equivalence class of one-to-one functions

$i: R \to X \times Y$

Why an equivalence class? The image of $i$ is our desired subset of $X \times Y.$ The set $R$ here could be replaced by any isomorphic set; its only role is to provide ‘names’ for the elements of $X \times Y$ that are in the image of $i.$

Now we have a relation described as an arrow, or really an equivalence class of arrows. Next, let’s turn the arrow around!

There are different things I might mean by that, but we want to do it cleverly. When we turn arrows around, the concept of product (for example, cartesian product $X \times Y$ of sets) turns into the concept of sum (for example, disjoint union $X + Y$ of sets). Similarly, the concept of monomorphism (such as a one-to-one function) turns into the concept of epimorphism (such as an onto function). If you don’t believe me, click on the links!

So, we should define a corelation from a set $X$ to a set $Y$ to be an equivalence class of onto functions

$p: X + Y \to C$

Why an equivalence class? The set $C$ here could be replaced by any isomorphic set; its only role is to provide ‘names’ for the sets of elements of $X + Y$ that get mapped to the same thing via $p.$

In simpler terms, a corelation from $X$ to a set $Y$ is just a partition of the disjoint union $X + Y.$ So, it looks like this:

If we like, we can then draw a line connecting any two points that lie in the same part of the partition:

These lines determine the corelation, so we can also draw a corelation this way:

This is why corelations describe circuits made solely of wires!

### The rules governing corelations

The main result in Brandon and Brendan’s paper is that $\mathrm{FinCorel}$ is equivalent to the PROP for extraspecial commutative Frobenius monoids. That’s a terse way of the laws governing $\mathrm{FinCorel}.$

Let me just show you the most important laws. In each of these law I’ll draw two circuits made of wires, and write an equals sign asserting that they give the same corelation from a set $X$ to a set $Y.$ The inputs $X$ of each circuit are on top, and the outputs $Y$ are at the bottom. I’ll draw 3-way junctions as little triangles, but don’t worry about that. When we compose two corelations we may get a wire left in mid-air, not connected to the inputs or outputs. We draw the end of the wire as a little circle.

There are some laws called the ‘commutative monoid’ laws:

and an upside-down version called the ‘cocommutative comonoid’ laws:

Then we have ‘Frobenius laws’:

and finally we have the ‘special’ and ‘extra’ laws:

All other laws can be derived from these in some systematic ways.

Commutative Frobenius monoids obey the commutative monoid laws, the cocommutative comonoid laws and the Frobenius laws. They play a fundamental role in 2d topological quantum field theory. Special Frobenius monoids are also well-known. But the ‘extra’ law, which says that a little piece of wire not connected to anything can be thrown away with no effect, is less well studied. Jason Erbele and I gave it this name in our work on control theory:

• John Baez and Jason Erbele, Categories in control. (Blog article here.)

### For more

David Ellerman has spent a lot of time studying what would happen to mathematics if we turned around a lot of arrows in a certain systematic way. In particular, just as the concept of relation would be replaced by the concept of corelation, the concept of subset would be replaced by the concept of partition. You can see how it fits together: just as a relation from $X$ to $Y$ is a subset of $X \times Y,$ a corelation from $X$ to $Y$ is a partition of $X + Y.$

There’s a lattice of subsets of a set:

In logic these subsets correspond to propositions, and the lattice operations are the logical operations ‘and’ and ‘or’. But there’s also a lattice of partitions of a set:

In Ellerman’s vision, this lattice of partitions gives a new kind of logic. You can read about it here:

• David Ellerman, Introduction to partition logic, Logic Journal of the Interest Group in Pure and Applied Logic 22 (2014), 94–125.

As mentioned, the main result in Brandon and Brendan’s paper is that $\mathrm{FinCorel}$ is equivalent to the PROP for extraspecial commutative Frobenius monoids. After they proved this, they noticed that the result has also been stated in other language and proved in other ways by two other authors:

• Fabio Zanasi, Interacting Hopf Algebras—the Theory of Linear Systems, PhD thesis, École Normale Supériere de Lyon, 2015.

• K. Dosen and Z. Petrić, Syntax for split preorders, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 164 (2013), 443–481.

Unsurprisingly, I prefer Brendan and Brandon’s approach to deriving the result. But it’s nice to see different perspectives!

## The Internal Model Principle

27 January, 2016

“Every good key must be a model of the lock it opens.”

That sentence states an obvious fact, but perhaps also a profound insight if we interpret it generally enough.

That sentence is also the title of a paper:

• Daniel L. Scholten, Every good key must be a model of the lock it opens (the Conant & Ashby Theorem revisited), 2010.

Scholten gives a lot of examples, including these:

• A key is a model of a lock’s keyhole.

• A city street map is a model of the actual city streets

• A restaurant menu is a model of the food the restaurant prepares and sells.

• Honey bees use a kind of dance to model the location of a source of nectar.

• An understanding of some phenomenon (for example a physicist’s understanding of lightning) is a mental model of the actual phenomenon.

This line of thought has an interesting application to control theory. It suggests that to do the best job of regulating some system, a control apparatus should include a model of that system.

Indeed, much earlier, Conant and Ashby tried to turn this idea into a theorem, the ‘good regulator theorem’:

• Roger C. Conant and W. Ross Ashby, Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system), International Journal of Systems Science 1 (1970), 89–97.

Scholten’s paper is heavily based on this earlier paper. He summarizes it as follows:

What all of this means, more or less, is that the pursuit of a goal by some dynamic agent (Regulator) in the face of a source of obstacles (System) places at least one particular and unavoidable demand on that agent, which is that the agent’s behaviors must be executed in such a reliable and predictable way that they can serve as a representation (Model) of that source of obstacles.

It’s not clear that this is true, but it’s an appealing thought.

A particularly self-referential example arises when the regulator is some organism and the System is the world it lives in, including itself. In this case, it seems the regulator should include a model of itself! This would lead, ultimately, to self-awareness.

It all sounds great. But Scholten raises an obvious question: if Conant and Ashby’s theorem is so great, why isn’t more well-known? Scholten puts it quite vividly:

Given the preponderance of control-models that are used by humans (the evidence for this preponderance will be surveyed in the latter part of the paper), and especially given the obvious need to regulate that system, one might guess that the C&A theorem would be at least as famous as, say, the Pythagorean Theorem ($a^2 + b^2 = c^2$), the Einstein mass-energy equivalence ($E = mc^2,$ which can be seen on T-shirts and bumper stickers), or the DNA double helix (which actually shows up in TV crime dramas and movies about super heroes). And yet, it would appear that relatively few lay-persons have ever even heard of C&A’s important prerequisite to successful regulation.

There could be various explanations. But here’s mine: when I tried to read Conant and Ashby’s paper, I got stuck. They use some very basic mathematical notation in nonstandard ways, and they don’t clearly state the hypotheses and conclusion of their theorem.

Luckily, the paper is short, and the argument, while mysterious, seems simple. So, I immediately felt I should be able to dream up the hypotheses, conclusion, and argument based on the hints given.

Scholten’s paper didn’t help much, since he says:

Throughout the following discussion I will assume that the reader has studied Conant & Ashby’s original paper, possesses the level of technical competence required to understand their proof, and is familiar with the components of the basic model that they used to prove their theorem [….]

However, I have a guess about the essential core of Conant and Ashby’s theorem. So, I’ll state that, and then say more about their setup.

Needless to say, I looked around to see if someone else had already done the work of figuring out what Conant and Ashby were saying. The best thing I found was this:

• B. A. Francis and W. M. Wonham, The internal model principle of control theory, Automatica 12 (1976) 457–465.

This paper works in a more specialized context: linear control theory. They’ve got a linear system or ‘plant’ responding to some input, a regulator or ‘compensator’ that is trying to make the plant behave in a desired way, and a ‘disturbance’ that affects the plant in some unwanted way. They prove that to perfectly correct for the disturbance, the compensator must contain an ‘internal model’ of the disturbance.

I’m probably stating this a bit incorrectly. This paper is much more technical, but it seems to be more careful in stating assumptions and conclusions. In particular, they seem to give a precise definition of an ‘internal model’. And I read elsewhere that the ‘internal model principle’ proved here has become a classic result in control theory!

This paper says that Conant and Ashby’s paper provided “plausibility arguments in favor of the internal model idea”. So, perhaps Conant and Ashby inspired Francis and Wonham, and were then largely forgotten.

### My guess

My guess is that Conant and Ashby’s theorem boils down to this:

Theorem. Let $R$ and $S$ be finite sets, and fix a probability distribution $p$ on $S$. Suppose $q$ is any probability distribution on $R \times S$ such that

$\displaystyle{ p(s) = \sum_{r \in R} q(r,s) \; \textrm{for all} \; s \in S}$

Let $H(p)$ be the Shannon entropy of $p$ and let $H(q)$ be the Shannon entropy of $q.$ Then

$H(q) \ge H(p)$

and equality is achieved if there is a function

$h: S \to R$

such that

$q(r,s) = \left\{\begin{array}{cc} p(s) & \textrm{if} \; r = h(s) \\ 0 & \textrm{otherwise} \end{array} \right.$       █

Note that this is not an ‘if and only if’.

The proof of this is pretty easy to anyone who knows a bit about probability theory and entropy. I can restate it using a bit of standard jargon, which may make it more obvious to experts. We’ve got an $S$-valued random variable, say $\textbf{s}.$ We want to extend it to an $R \times S$-valued random variable $(\textbf{r}, \textbf{s})$ whose entropy is small as possible. Then we can achieve this by choosing a function $h: S \to R,$ and letting $\textbf{s} = h(\textbf{r}).$

Here’s the point: if we make $\textbf{s}$ be a function of $\textbf{r},$ we aren’t adding any extra randomness, so the entropy doesn’t go up.

What in the world does this have to do with a good regulator containing a model of the system it’s regulating?

Well, I can’t explain that as well as I’d like—sorry. But the rough idea seems to be this. Suppose that $S$ is a system with a given random behavior, and $R$ is another system, the regulator. If we want the combination of the system and regulator to behave as ‘nonrandomly’ as possible, we can let the state of the regulator be a function of the state of the system.

This theorem is actually a ‘lemma’ in Conant and Ashby’s paper. Let’s look at their setup, and the ‘good regulator theorem’ as they actually state it.

### Their setup

Conant and Ashby consider five sets and three functions. In a picture:

The sets are these:

• A set $Z$ of possible outcomes.

• A goal: some subset $G \subseteq Z$ of good outcomes

• A set $D$ of disturbances, which I might prefer to call ‘inputs’.

• A set $S$ of states of some system that is affected by the disturbances.

• A set $R$ of states of some regulator that is also affected by the disturbances.

The functions are these:

• A function $\phi : D \to S$ saying how a disturbance determines a state of the system.

• A function $\rho: D \to R$ saying how a disturbance determines a state of the regulator.

• A function $\psi: S \times R \to Z$ saying how a state of the system and a state of the regulator determines an outcome.

Of course we want some conditions on these maps. What we want, I guess, is for the outcome to be good regardless of the disturbance. I might say that as follows: for every $d \in D$ we have

$\psi(\phi(d), \rho(d)) \in G$

Unfortunately Conant and Ashby say they want this:

$\rho \subset [\psi^{-1}(G)]\phi$

I can’t parse this: they’re using math notation in ways I don’t recognize. Can you figure out what they mean, and whether it matches my guess above?

Then, after a lot of examples and stuff, they state their theorem:

Theorem. The simplest optimal regulator $R$ of a reguland $S$ produces events $R$ which are related to events $S$ by a mapping $h: S \to R.$

Clearly I’ve skipped over too much! This barely makes any sense at all.

Unfortunately, looking at the text before the theorem, I don’t see these terms being explained. Furthermore, their ‘proof’ introduces extra assumptions that were not mentioned in the statement of the theorem. It begins:

The sets $R, S,$ and $Z$ and the mapping $\psi: R \times S \to Z$ are presumed given. We will assume that over the set $S$ there exists a probability distribution $p(S)$ which gives the relative frequencies of the events in $S.$ We will further assume that the behaviour of any particular regulator $R$ is specified by a conditional distribution $p(R|S)$ giving, for each event in $S,$ a distribution on the regulatory events in $R.$

Get it? Now they’re saying the state of the regulator $R$ depends on the state of the system $S$ via a conditional probability distribution $p(r|s)$ where $r \in R$ and $s \in S.$ It’s odd that they didn’t mention this earlier! Their picture made it look like the state of the regulator is determined by the ‘disturbance’ via the function $\rho: D \to R.$ But okay.

They’re also assuming there’s a probability distribution on $S.$ They use this and the above conditional probability distribution to get a probability distribution on $R.$

In fact, the set $D$ and the functions out of this set seem to play no role in their proof!

It’s unclear to me exactly what we’re given, what we get to choose, and what we’re trying to optimize. They do try to explain this. Here’s what they say:

Now $p(S)$ and $p(R|S)$ jointly determine $p(R,S)$ and hence $p(Z)$ and $H(Z),$ the entropy in the set of outcomes:

$\displaystyle{ H(Z) = - \sum_{z \in Z} p(z) \log (p(z)) }$

With $p(S)$ fixed, the class of optimal regulators therefore corresponds to the class of optimal distributions $p(R|S)$ for which $H(Z)$ is minimal. We will call this class of optimal distributions $\pi.$

I could write a little essay on why this makes me unhappy, but never mind. I’m used to the habit of using the same letter $p$ to stand for probability distributions on lots of different sets: folks let the argument of $p$ say which set they have in mind at any moment. So, they’re starting with a probability distribution on $S$ and a conditional probability distribution on $r \in R$ given $s \in S.$ They’re using these to determine probability distribution on $R \times S.$ Then, presumably using the map $\psi: S \times R \to Z,$ they get a probability distribution on $Z.$ $H(Z)$ is the entropy of the probability distribution on $Z,$ and for some reason they are trying to minimize this.

(Where did the subset $G \subseteq Z$ of ‘good’ outcomes go? Shouldn’t that play a role? Oh well.)

I believe the claim is that when this entropy is minimized, there’s a function $h : S \to R$ such that

$p(r|s) = 1 \; \textrm{if} \; r = h(s)$

This says that the state of the regulator should be completely determined by the the state of the system. And this, I believe, is what they mean by

Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system.

I hope you understand: I’m not worrying about whether the setup is a good one, e.g. sufficiently general for real-world applications. I’m just trying to figure out what the setup actually is, what Conant and Ashby’s theorem actually says, and whether it’s true.

I think I’ve just made a lot of progress. Surely this was no fun to read. But it I found it useful to write it.