## Cartesian Bicategories

1 March, 2018

Two students in the Applied Category Theory 2018 school have blogged about a classic paper in category theory:

• Daniel Cicala and Jules Hedges, Cartesian bicategories, The n-Category Café, 19 February 2018.

Jules Hedges is a postdoc in the computer science department at Oxford who is applying category theory to game theory and economics. Daniel Cicala is a grad student working with me on a compositional approach to graph rewriting, which is about stuff like this:

This picture shows four ‘open graphs’: graphs with inputs and outputs. The vertices are labelled with operations. The top of the picture shows a ‘rewrite rule’ where one open graph is turned into another: the operation of multiplying by 2 is replaced by the operation of adding something to itself. The bottom of the picture shows one way we can ‘apply’ this rule: this takes us from open graph at bottom left to the open graph at bottom right.

So, we can use graph rewriting to think about ways to transform a computer program into another, perhaps simpler, computer program that does the same thing.

How do we formalize this?

A computer program wants to be a morphism, since it’s a process that turns some input into some output. Rewriting wants to be a 2-morphism, since it’s a ‘meta-process’ that turns some program into some other program. So, there should be some bicategory with computer programs (or labelled open graphs!) as morphisms and rewrites as 2-morphisms. In fact there should be a bunch of such bicategories, since there are a lot of details that one can tweak.

Together with my student Kenny Courser, Daniel has been investigating these bicategories:

• Daniel Cicala, Spans of cospans, Theory and Applications of Categories 33 (2018), 131–147.

Abstract. We discuss the notion of a span of cospans and define, for them, horizonal and vertical composition. These compositions satisfy the interchange law if working in a topos C and if the span legs are monic. A bicategory is then constructed from C-objects, C-cospans, and doubly monic spans of C-cospans. The primary motivation for this construction is an application to graph rewriting.

• Daniel Cicala, Spans of cospans in a topos, Theory and Applications of Categories 33 (2018), 1–22.

Abstract. For a topos T, there is a bicategory MonicSp(Csp(T)) whose objects are those of T, morphisms are cospans in T, and 2-morphisms are isomorphism classes of monic spans of cospans in T. Using a result of Shulman, we prove that MonicSp(Csp(T)) is symmetric monoidal, and moreover, that it is compact closed in the sense of Stay. We provide an application which illustrates how to encode double pushout rewrite rules as 2-morphisms inside a compact closed sub-bicategory of MonicSp(Csp(Graph)).

This stuff sounds abstract and esoteric when they talk about it, but it’s really all about things like the picture above—and it’s an important part of network theory!

Recently Daniel Cicala has noticed that some of the bicategories he’s getting are ‘cartesian bicategories’ in the sense of this paper:

• Aurelio Carboni and Robert F. C. Walters, Cartesian bicategories I, Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra 49 (1987), 11–32.

And that’s the paper he’s blogging about now with Jules Hedges!

## Complex Adaptive System Design (Part 7)

19 February, 2018

In March, I’ll be talking at Spencer Breiner‘s workshop on Applied Category Theory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. I’ll be giving a joint talk with John Foley about our work using operads to design networks. This work is part of the Complex Adaptive System Composition and Design Environment project being done by Metron Scientific Solutions and managed by John Paschkewitz at DARPA.

• Complex adaptive systems design: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6.

But we’ve done a lot more, and my blog articles are having trouble keeping up! So I’d like to sketch out the big picture as it stands today.

If I had to summarize, I’d say we’ve developed a formalism for step-by-step compositional design and tasking, using commitment networks. But this takes a while to explain.

Here’s a very simple example of a commitment network:

It has four nodes, which represent agents: a port, a helicopter, a UAV (an unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone) and a target. The edges between these notes describe relationships between these agents. Some of these relationships are ‘commitments’. For example, the edges labelled ‘SIR’ say that one agent should ‘search, intervene and rescue’ the other.

Our framework for dealing with commitment networks has some special features. It uses operads, but this isn’t really saying much. An ‘operad’ is a bunch of ways of sticking things together. An ‘algebra’ of the operad gives a particular collection of these things, and says what we get when we stick them together. These concepts are extremely general, so there’s a huge diversity of operads, each with a huge diversity of algebras. To say one is using operads to solve a problem is a bit like saying one is using math. What matters more is the specific kind of operad one is using, and how one is using it.

For our work, we needed to develop a new class of operads called network operads, which are described here:

• John Baez, John Foley, Joseph Moeller and Blake Pollard, Network models.

In this paper we mainly discuss communication networks. Subsequently we’ve been working on a special class of network operads that describe how to build commitment networks.

Here are some of key ideas:

• Using network operads we can build bigger networks from smaller ones by overlaying them. David Spivak’s operad of wiring diagrams only let us ‘wire together’ smaller networks to form bigger ones:

Here networks X1, X2 and X3 are being wired together to form Y.

Network operads also let us wire together networks, but in addition they let us take one network:

and overlay another:

to create a larger network:

This is a new methodology for designing systems. We’re all used to building systems by wiring together subsystems: anyone who has a home stereo system has done this. But overlaying systems lets us do more. For example, we can take two plans of action involving the same collection of agents, and overlay them to get a new plan. We’ve all done this, too: you tell a bunch of people to do things… and then tell the same people, or an overlapping set of people, to do some other things. But lots of problems can arise if you aren’t careful. A mathematically principled approach can avoid some of these problems.

• The nodes of our networks represent agents of various types. The edges represent various relationships between agents. For example, they can represent communication channels. But more interestingly, they can represent commitments. For example, we can have an edge from A to B saying that agent A has to go rescue agent B. We call this kind of network a commitment network.

• By overlaying commitment networks, we can not only build systems out of smaller pieces but also build complicated plans by overlaying smaller pieces of plans. Since ‘tasking’ means telling a system what to do, we call this compositional tasking.

• If one isn’t careful, overlaying commitment networks can produce conflicts. Suppose we have a network with an edge saying that agent A has to rescue agent B. On top of this we overlay a network with an edge saying that A has to rescue agent C. If A can’t do both of these tasks at once, what should A do? There are various choices. We need to build a specific choice into the framework, so we can freely overlay commitment networks and get a well-defined result that doesn’t overburden the agents involved. We call this automatic deconflicting.

• Our approach to automatic deconflicting uses an idea developed by the famous category theorist Bill Lawvere: graphic monoids. I’ll explain these later, along with some of their side-benefits.

• Networks operads should let us do step-by-step compositional tasking. In other words, they should let us partially automate the process of tasking networks of agents, both

1) compositionally: tasking smaller networks and then sticking them together, e.g. by overlaying them, to get larger networks,

and

2) in a step-by-step way, starting at a low level of detail and then increasing the amount of detail.

To do this we need not just operads but their algebras.

• Remember, a network operad is a bunch of ways to stick together networks of some kind, e.g. by overlaying them. An algebra of this operad specifies a particular collection of networks of this kind, and says what we actually get when we stick them together.

So, a network operad can have one algebra in which things are described in a bare-bones, simplified way, and another algebra in which things are described in more detail. Indeed it will typically have many algebras, corresponding to many levels of detail, but for simplicity let’s just think about two.

When we have a ‘less detailed’ algebra $A$ and a ‘more detailed’ algebra $A',$ they will typically be related by a map

$f \colon A' \to A$

which ‘forgets the extra details’. This sort of map is called a homomorphism of algebras. We give examples in our paper Network models.

But what we usually want to do, when designing a system, is not forget extra detail, but rather add extra detail to a rough specification. There is not always a systematic way to do this. If there is, then we may have a homomorphism

$g \colon A \to A'$

going back the other way. This lets us automate the process of filling in the details. But we can’t usually count on being able to do this. So, often we may have to start with an element of $A$ and search for an element of $A'$ that is mapped to it by $f : A' \to A.$ And typically we want this element to be optimal, or at least ‘good enough’, according to some chosen criteria. Expressing this idea formally helps us figure out how to automate the search. John Foley, in particular, has been working on this.

That’s an overview of our ideas.

Next, for the mathematically inclined, I want to give a few more details on one of the new elements not mentioned in our Network models paper: ‘graphic monoids’.

### Graphic monoids

In our paper Network models we explain how the ‘overlay’ operation makes the collection of networks involving a given set of agents into a monoid. A monoid is a set M with a product that is associative and has an identity element 1:

$(xy)z = x(yz)$
$1 x = x = x 1$

In our application, this product is overlaying two networks.

A graphic monoid is one in which the graphic identity

$x y x = x y$

holds for all $x,y.$

To understand this identity, let us think of the elements of the monoid as “commitments”. The product $x y$ means “first committing to do $x,$ then committing to do $y$”. The graphic identity says that if we first commit to do $x$, then $y$, and then $x$ again, it’s the same as first committing to do $x$ and then $y.$ Committing to do $x$ again doesn’t change anything!

In particular, in any graphic monoid we have

$xx = x 1 x = x 1 = x$

so making the same commitment twice is the same as making it once. Mathematically we say every element $x$ of a graphic monoid is idempotent:

$x^2 = x$

A commutative monoid obeying this law $x^2 = x$ automatically obeys the graphic identity, since then

$x y x = x^2 y = x y$

But for a noncommutative monoid, the graphic identity is stronger than $x^2 = x$. It says that after committing to $x,$ no matter what intervening commitments one might have made, committing to $x$ again has no further effect. In other words: the intervening commitments did not undo the original commitment, so making the original commitment a second time has no effect! This captures the idea of how promises should behave.

As I said, for any network model, the set of all networks involving a fixed set of agents is a monoid. In a commitment network model, this monoid is required to be a graphic monoid. Joseph Moeller is writing a paper that shows how to construct a large class of commitment network models. We will follow this with a paper illustrating how to use these in compositional tasking.

For now, let me just mention a side-benefit. In any graphic monoid we can define a relation $x \le y$ by

$x \le y \; \iff \;$ x a = y \$ for some $a$

This makes the graphic monoid into a partially ordered set, meaning that these properties hold:

reflexivity: $x \le x$

transitivity: $x \le y , y \le z \; \implies \; x \le z$

antisymmetry: $x \le y, y \le x \; \implies x = y$

In the context of commitment networks, $x \le y$ means that starting from $x$ we can reach $y$ by making some further commitment $a$: that is, $x a = y$ for some $a$. So, as we ‘task’ a collection of agents by giving them more and more commitments, we move up in this partial order.

## Statebox: A Universal Language of Distributed Systems

22 January, 2018

guest post by Christian Williams

A short time ago, on the Croatian island of Zlarin, there gathered a band of bold individuals—rebels of academia and industry, whose everyday thoughts and actions challenge the separations of the modern world. They journeyed from all over to learn of the grand endeavor of another open mind, an expert functional programmer and creative hacktivist with significant mathematical knowledge: Jelle |yell-uh| Herold.

The Dutch computer scientist has devoted his life to helping our species and our planet: from consulting in business process optimization to winning a Greenpeace hackathon, from updating Netherlands telecommunications to creating a website to determine ways for individuals to help heal the earth, Jelle has gained a comprehensive perspective of the interconnected era. Through a diverse and innovative career, he has garnered crucial insights into software design and network computation—most profoundly, he has realized that it is imperative that these immense forces of global change develop thoughtful, comprehensive systematization.

Jelle understood that initiating such a grand ambition requires a massive amount of work, and the cooperation of many individuals, fluent in different fields of mathematics and computer science. Enter the Zlarin meeting: after a decade of consideration, Jelle has now brought together proponents of categories, open games, dependent types, Petri nets, string diagrams, and blockchains toward a singular end: a universal language of distributed systems—Statebox.

Statebox is a programming language formed and guided by fundamental concepts and principles of theoretical mathematics and computer science. The aim is to develop the canonical process language for distributed systems, and thereby elucidate the way these should actually be designed. The idea invokes the deep connections of these subjects in a novel and essential way, to make code simple, transparent, and concrete. Category theory is both the heart and pulse of this endeavor; more than a theory, it is a way of thinking universally. We hope the project helps to demonstrate the importance of this perspective, and encourages others to join.

The language is designed to be self-optimizing, open, adaptive, terminating, error-cognizant, composable, and most distinctively—visual. Petri nets are the natural representation of decentralized computation and concurrency. By utilizing them as program models, the entire language is diagrammatic, and this allows one to inspect the flow of the process executed by the program. While most languages only compile into illegible machine code, Statebox compiles directly into diagrams, so that the user immediately sees and understands the concrete realization of the abstract design. We believe that this immanent connection between the “geometric” and “algebraic” aspects of computation is of great importance.

Compositionality is a rightfully popular contemporary term, indicating the preservation of type under composition of systems or processes. This is essential to the universality of the type, and it is intrinsic to categories, which underpin the Petri net. A pertinent example is that composition allows for a form of abstraction in which programs do not require complete specification. This is parametricity: a program becomes executable when the functions are substituted with valid terms. Every term has a type, and one cannot connect pieces of code that have incompatible inputs and outputs—the compiler would simply produce an error. The intent is to preserve a simple mathematical structure that imposes as little as possible, and still ensure rationality of code. We can then more easily and reliably write tools providing automatic proofs of termination and type-correctness. Many more aspects will be explained as we go along, and in more detail in future posts.

Statebox is more than a specific implementation. It is an evolving aspiration, expressing an ideal, a source of inspiration, signifying a movement. We fully recognize that we are at the dawn of a new era, and do not assume that the current presentation is the best way to fulfill this ideal—but it is vital that this kind of endeavor gains the hearts and minds of these communities. By learning to develop and design by pure theory, we make a crucial step toward universal systems and knowledge. Formalisms are biased, fragile, transient—thought is eternal.

Thank you for reading, and thank you to John Baez—|bi-ez|, some there were not aware—for allowing me to write this post. Azimuth and its readers represent what scientific progress can and should be; it is an honor to speak to you. My name is Christian Williams, and I have just begun my doctoral studies with Dr. Baez. He received the invitation from Jelle and could not attend, and was generous enough to let me substitute. Disclaimer: I am just a young student with big dreams, with insufficient knowledge to do justice to this huge topic. If you can forgive some innocent confidence and enthusiasm, I would like to paint a big picture, to explain why this project is important. I hope to delve deeper into the subject in future posts, and in general to celebrate and encourage the cognitive revolution of Applied Category Theory. (Thank you also to Anton and Fabrizio for providing some of this writing when I was not well; I really appreciate it.)

Statebox Summit, Zlarin 2017, was awesome. Wish you could’ve been there. Just a short swim in the Adriatic from the old city of Šibenik |shib-enic|, there lies the small, green island of Zlarin |zlah-rin|, with just a few hundred kind inhabitants. Jelle’s friend, and part of the Statebox team, Anton Livaja and his family graciously allowed us to stay in their houses. Our headquarters was a hotel, one of the few places open in the fall. We set up in the back dining room for talks and work, and for food and sunlight we came to the patio and were brought platters of wonderful, wholesome Croatian dishes. As we burned the midnight oil, we enjoyed local beer, and already made history—the first Bitcoin transaction of the island, with a progressive bartender, Vinko.

Zlarin is a lovely place, but we haven’t gotten to the best part—the people. All who attended are brilliant, creative, and spirited. Everyone’s eyes had a unique spark to light. I don’t think I’ve ever met such a fascinating group in my life. The crew: Jelle, Anton, Emi Gheorghe, Fabrizio Genovese, Daniel van Dijk, Neil Ghani, Viktor Winschel, Philipp Zahn, Pawel Sobocinski, Jules Hedges, Andrew Polonsky, Robin Piedeleu, Alex Norta, Anthony di Franco, Florian Glatz, Fredrik Nordvall Forsberg. These innovators have provocative and complementary ideas in category theory, computer science, open game theory, functional programming, and the blockchain industry; and they came to share an important goal. These are people who work earnestly to better humanity, motivated by progress, not profit. Talking with them gave me hope, that there are enough intelligent, open-minded, and caring people to fix this mess of modern society. In our short time together, we connected—now, almost all continue to contribute and grow the endeavor.

Why is society a mess? The present human condition is absurd. We are in a cognitive renaissance, yet our world is in peril. We need to realize a deeper harmony of theory and practice—we need ideas that dare to dream big, that draw on the vast wealth of contemporary thought to guide and unite subjects in one mission. The way of the world is only a reflection of how we choose to think, and for more than a century we have delved endlessly into thought itself. If we truly learn from our thought, knowledge and application become imminently interrelated, not increasingly separate. It is imperative that we abandon preconception, pretense and prejudice, and ask with naive sincerity: “How should things be, really, and how can we make it happen?”

This pertains more generally to the irresponsibly ad hoc nature of society—we find ourselves entrenched in inadequate systems. Food, energy, medicine, finance, communications, media, governance, technology—our deepening dependence on centralization is our greatest vulnerability. Programming practice is the perfect example of the gradual failure of systems when their design is left to wander in abstraction. As business requirements evolved, technological solutions were created haphazardly, the priority being immediate return over comprehensive methodology, which resulted in ‘duct-taped’ systems, such as the Windows OS. Our entire world now depends on unsystematic software, giving rise to so much costly disorganization, miscommunication, and worse, bureaucracy. Statebox aims to close the gap between the misguided formalisms which came out of this type of degeneration, and design a language which corresponds naturally to essential mathematical concepts—to create systems which are rational, principled, universal. To explain why Statebox represents to us such an important ideal, we must first consider its closest relative, the elephant in the technological room: blockchain.

Often the best ideas are remarkably simple—in 2008, an unknown person under the alias Satoshi Nakamoto published the whitepaper Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. In just a few pages, a protocol was proposed which underpins a new kind of computational network, called a blockchain, in which interactions are immediate, transparent, and permanent. This is a personal interpretation—the paper focuses on the application given in its title. In the original financial context, immediacy is one’s ability to directly transact with anyone, without intermediaries, such as banks; transparency is one’s right to complete knowledge of the economy in which one participates, meaning that each node owns a copy of the full history of the network; permanence is the irrevocability of one’s transactions. These core aspects are made possible by an elegant use of cryptography and game theory, which essentially removes the need for trusted third parties in the authorization, verification, and documentation of transactions. Per word, it’s almost peerless in modern influence; the short and sweet read is recommended.

The point of this simplistic explanation is that blockchain is about more than economics. The transaction could be any cooperation, the value could be any social good—when seen as a source of consensus, the blockchain protocol can be expanded to assimilate any data and code. After several years of competing cryptocurrencies, the importance of this deeper idea was gradually realized. There arose specialized tools to serve essential purposes in some broader system, and only recently have people dared to conceive of what this latter could be. In 2014, a wunderkind named Vitalik Buterin created Ethereum, a fully programmable blockchain. Solidity is a Turing-complete language of smart contracts, autonomous programs which enable interactions and enact rules on the network. With this framework, one can not only transact with others, but implement any kind of process; one can build currencies, websites, or organizations—decentralized applications, constructed with smart contracts, could be just about anything.

There is understandably great confidence and excitement for these ventures, and many are receiving massive public investment. Seriously, the numbers are staggering—but most of it is pure hype. There is talk of the first global computer, the internet of value, a single shared source of truth, and other speculative descriptions. But compared to the ambition, the actual theory is woefully underdeveloped. So far, implementations make almost no use of the powerful ideas of mathematics. There are still basic flaws in blockchain itself, the foundation of almost all decentralized technology. For example, the two viable candidates for transaction verification are called Proof of Work and Proof of Stake: the former requires unsustainable consumption of resources, namely hardware and electricity, and the latter is susceptible to centralization. Scalability is a major problem, thus also cost and speed of transactions. A major Ethereum dApp, Decentralized Autonomous Organization, was hacked.

These statements are absolutely not to disregard all of the great work of this community; it is primarily rhetoric to distinguish the high ideals of Statebox, and I lack the eloquence to make the point diplomatically, nor near the knowledge to give a real account of this huge endeavor. We now return to the rhetoric.

What seems to be lost in the commotion is the simple recognition that we do not yet really know what we should make, nor how to do so. The whole idea is simply too big—the space of possibility is almost completely unknown, because this innovation can open every aspect of society to reform. But as usual, people try to ignore their ignorance, imagining it will disappear, and millions clamor about things we do not yet understand. Most involved are seeing decentralization as an exciting business venture, rather than our best hope to change the way of this broken world; they want to cash in on another technological wave. Of the relatively few idealists, most still retain the assumptions and limitations of the blockchain.

For all this talk, there is little discussion of how to even work toward the ideal abstract design. Most mathematics associated to blockchain is statistical analysis of consensus, while we’re sitting on a mountain of powerful categorical knowledge of systems. At the summit, Prof. Neil Ghani said “it’s like we’re on the Moon, talking about going to Mars, while everyone back on Earth still doesn’t even have fire.” We have more than enough conceptual technology to begin developing an ideal and comprehensive system, if the right minds come together. Theory guides practice, practice motivates theory—the potential is immense.

Fortunately, there are those who have this big picture in mind. Long before the blockchain craze, Jelle saw the fundamental importance of both distributed systems and the need for academic-industrial symbiosis. In the mid-2000’s, he used Petri nets to create process tools for businesses. Employees could design and implement any kind of abstract workflow to more effectively communicate and produce. Jelle would provide consultation to optimize these processes, and integrate them into their existing infrastructure—as it executed, it would generate tasks, emails, forms and send them to designated individuals to be completed for the next iteration. Many institutions would have to shell out millions of dollars to IBM or Fujitsu for this kind of software, and his was more flexible and intuitive. This left a strong impression on Jelle, regarding the power of Petri nets and the impact of deliberate design.

Many experiences like this gradually instilled in Jelle a conviction to expand his knowledge and begin planning bold changes to the world of programming. He attended mathematics conferences, and would discuss with theorists from many relevant subjects. On the island, he told me that it was actually one of Baez’s talks about networks which finally inspired him to go for this huge idea. By sincerely and openly reaching out to the whole community, Jelle made many valuable connections. He invited these thinkers to share his vision—theorists from all over Europe, and some from overseas, gathered in Croatia to learn and begin to develop this project—and it was a great success.

By now you may be thinking, alright kid spill the beans already. Here they are, right into your brain—well, most will be in the next post, but we should at least have a quick overview of some of the main ideas not already discussed.

The notion of open system complements compositionality. The great difference between closure and openness, in society as well as theory, was a central theme in many of our conversations during the summit. Although we try to isolate and suspend life and cognition in abstraction, the real, concrete truth is what flows through these ethereal forms. Every system in Statebox is implicitly open, and this impels design to idealize the inner and outer connections of processes. Open systems are central to the Baez Network Theory research team. There are several ways to categorically formalize open systems; the best are still being developed, but the first main example can be found in The Algebra of Open and Interconnected Systems by Brendan Fong, an early member of the team.

Monoidal categories, as this blog knows well, represent systems with both series and parallel processes. One of the great challenge of this new era of interconnection is distributed computation—getting computers to work together as a supercomputer, and monoidal categories are essential to this. Here, objects are data types, and morphisms are computations, while composition is serial and tensor is parallel. As Dr. Baez has demonstrated with years of great original research, monoidal categories are essential to understanding the complexity of the world. If we can connect our knowledge of natural systems to social systems, we can learn to integrate valuable principles—a key example being complete resource cognizance.

Petri nets are presentations of free strict symmetric monoidal categories, and as such they are ideal models of “normal” computation, i.e. associative, unital, and commutative. Open Petri nets are the workhorses of Statebox. They are the morphisms of a category which is itself monoidal—and via openness it is even richer and more versatile. Most importantly it is compact closed, which introduces a simple but crucial duality into computation—input-output interchange—which is impossible in conventional cartesian closed computation, and actually brings the paradigm closer to quantum computation

Petri nets represent processes in an intuitive, consistent, and decentralized way. These will be multi-layered via the notion of operad and a resourceful use of Petri net tokens, representing the interacting levels of a system. Compositionality makes exploring their state space much easier: the state space of a big process can be constructed from those of smaller ones, a technique that more often than not avoids state space explosion, a long-standing problem in Petri net analysis. The correspondence between open Petri nets and a logical calculus, called place/transition calculus, allows the user to perform queries on the Petri net, and a revolutionary technique called information-gain computing greatly reduces response time.

Dependently typed functional programming is the exoskeleton of this beautiful beast; in particular, the underlying language is Idris. Dependent types arose out of both theoretical mathematics and computer science, and they are beginning to be recognized as very general, powerful, and natural in practice. Functional programming is a similarly pure and elegant paradigm for “open” computation. They are fascinating and inherently categorical, and deserve whole blog posts in the future.

Even economics has opened its mind to categories. Statebox is very fortunate to have several of these pioneers—open game theory is a categorical, compositional version of game theory, which allows the user to dynamically analyze and optimize code. Jules’ choice of the term “teleological category” is prescient; it is about more than just efficiency—it introduces the possibility of building principles into systems, by creating game-theoretical incentives which can guide people to cooperate for the greater good, and gradually lessen the influence of irrational, selfish priorities.

Categories are the language by which Petri nets, functional programming, and open games can communicate—and amazingly, all of these theories are unified in an elegant representation called string diagrams. These allow the user to forget the formalism, and reason purely in graphical terms. All the complex mathematics goes under the hood, and the user only needs to work with nodes and strings, which are guaranteed to be formally correct.

Category theory also models the data structures that are used by Statebox: Typedefs is a very lightweight—but also very expressive—data structure, that is at the very core of Statebox. It is based on initial F-algebras, and can be easily interpreted in a plethora of pre-existing solutions, enabling seamless integration with existing systems. One of the core features of Typedefs is that serialization is categorically internalized in the data structure, meaning that every operation involving types can receive a unique hash and be recorded on the blockchain public ledger. This is one of the many components that make Statebox fail-resistant: every process and event is accounted for on the public ledger, and the whole history of a process can be rolled back and analyzed thanks to the blockchain technology.

The Statebox team is currently working on a monograph that will neatly present how all the pertinent categorical theories work together in Statebox. This is a formidable task that will take months to complete, but will also be the cleanest way to understand how Statebox works, and which mathematical questions have still to be answered to obtain a working product. It will be a thorough document that also considers important aspects such as our guiding ethics.

The team members are devoted to creating something positive and different, explicitly and solely to better the world. The business paradigm is based on the principle that innovation should be open and collaborative, rather than competitive and exclusive. We want to share ideas and work with you. There are many blooming endeavors which share the ideals that have been described in this article, and we want them all to learn from each other and build off one another.

For example, Statebox contributor and visionary economist Viktor Winschel has a fantastic project called Oicos. The great proponent of applied category theory, David Spivak, has an exciting and impressive organization called Categorical Informatics. Mike Stay, a past student of Dr. Baez, has started a company called Pyrofex, which is developing categorical distributed computation. There are also somewhat related languages for blockchain, such as Simplicity, and innovative distributed systems such as Iota and RChain. Even Ethereum is beginning to utilize categories, with Casper. And of course there are research groups, such as Network Theory and Mathematically Structured Programming, as well as so many important papers, such as Algebraic Databases. This is just a slice of everything going on; as far as I know there is not yet a comprehensive account of all the great applied category theory and distributed innovations being developed. Inevitably these endeavors will follow the principle they share, and come together in a big way. Statebox is ready, willing, and able to help make this reality.

If you are interested in Statebox, you are welcomed with open arms. You can contact Jelle at jelle@statebox.io, Fabrizio at fabrizio@statebox.org, Emi at emi@statebox.io, Anton at anton@statebox.io; they can provide more information, connect you to the discussion, or anything else. There will be a second summit in 2018 in about six months, details to be determined. We hope to see you there. Future posts will keep you updated, and explain more of the theory and design of Statebox. Thank you very much for reading.

P.S. Found unexpected support in Šibenik! Great bar—once a reservoir.

## Applied Category Theory at UCR (Part 3)

13 November, 2017

We had a special session on applied category theory here at UCR:

Applied category theory, Fall Western Sectional Meeting of the AMS, 4-5 November 2017, U.C. Riverside.

A bunch of people stayed for a few days afterwards, and we had a lot of great discussions. I wish I could explain everything that happened, but I’m too busy right now. Luckily, even if you couldn’t come here, you can now see slides of almost all the talks… and videos of many!

Click on talk titles to see abstracts. For multi-author talks, the person whose name is in boldface is the one who gave the talk. For videos, go here: I haven’t yet created links to all the videos.

### Saturday November 4, 2017

9:00 a.m.A higher-order temporal logic for dynamical systemstalk slides.
David I. Spivak, MIT.

10:00 a.m.
Algebras of open dynamical systems on the operad of wiring diagramstalk slides.
Dmitry Vagner, Duke University
David I. Spivak, MIT
Eugene Lerman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

10:30 a.m.
Abstract dynamical systemstalk slides.
Christina Vasilakopoulou, UCR
David Spivak, MIT
Patrick Schultz, MIT

3:00 p.m.
Decorated cospanstalk slides.
Brendan Fong, MIT

4:00 p.m.
Compositional modelling of open reaction networkstalk slides.
Blake S. Pollard, UCR
John C. Baez, UCR

4:30 p.m.
A bicategory of coarse-grained Markov processestalk slides.
Kenny Courser, UCR

5:00 p.m.
A bicategorical syntax for pure state qubit quantum mechanicstalk slides.
Daniel M. Cicala, UCR

5:30 p.m.
Open systems in classical mechanicstalk slides.

### Sunday November 5, 2017

9:00 a.m.
Controllability and observability: diagrams and dualitytalk slides.
Jason Erbele, Victor Valley College

9:30 a.m.
Frobenius monoids, weak bimonoids, and corelationstalk slides.
Brandon Coya, UCR

10:00 a.m.
Compositional design and tasking of networks.
John D. Foley, Metron, Inc.
John C. Baez, UCR
Joseph Moeller, UCR
Blake S. Pollard, UCR

10:30 a.m.
Operads for modeling networkstalk slides.
Joseph Moeller, UCR
John Foley, Metron Inc.
John C. Baez, UCR
Blake S. Pollard, UCR

2:00 p.m.
Reeb graph smoothing via cosheavestalk slides.
Vin de Silva, Department of Mathematics, Pomona College

3:00 p.m.
Knowledge representation in bicategories of relationstalk slides.
Evan Patterson, Stanford University, Statistics Department

3:30 p.m.
The multiresolution analysis of flow graphstalk slides.
Steve Huntsman, BAE Systems

4:00 p.m.
Data modeling and integration using the open source tool Algebraic Query Language (AQL)talk slides.
Peter Y. Gates, Categorical Informatics
Ryan Wisnesky, Categorical Informatics

## Complex Adaptive System Design (Part 6)

31 October, 2017

I’ve been slacking off on writing this series of posts… but for a good reason: I’ve been busy writing a paper on the same topic! In the process I caught a couple of mistakes in what I’ve said so far. But more importantly, there’s a version out now, that you can read:

• John Baez, John Foley, Blake Pollard and Joseph Moeller, Network models.

There will be two talks about this at the AMS special session on Applied Category Theory this weekend at U. C. Riverside: one by John Foley of Metron Inc., and one by my grad student Joseph Moeller. I’ll try to get their talk slides someday. But for now, here’s the basic idea.

Our goal is to build operads suited for designing networks. These could be networks where the vertices represent fixed or moving agents and the edges represent communication channels. More generally, they could be networks where the vertices represent entities of various types, and the edges represent relationships between these entities—for example, that one agent is committed to take some action involving the other. This paper arose from an example where the vertices represent planes, boats and drones involved in a search and rescue mission in the Caribbean. However, even for this one example, we wanted a flexible formalism that can handle networks of many kinds, described at a level of detail that the user is free to adjust.

To achieve this flexibility, we introduced a general concept of ‘network model’. Simply put, a network model is a kind of network. Any network model gives an operad whose operations are ways to build larger networks of this kind by gluing smaller ones. This operad has a ‘canonical’ algebra where the operations act to assemble networks of the given kind. But it also has other algebras, where it acts to assemble networks of this kind equipped with extra structure and properties. This flexibility is important in applications.

What exactly is a ‘kind of network’? That’s the question we had to answer. We started with some examples, At the crudest level, we can model networks as simple graphs. If the vertices are agents of some sort and the edges represent communication channels, this means we allow at most one channel between any pair of agents.

However, simple graphs are too restrictive for many applications. If we allow multiple communication channels between a pair of agents, we should replace simple graphs with ‘multigraphs’. Alternatively, we may wish to allow directed channels, where the sender and receiver have different capabilities: for example, signals may only be able to flow in one direction. This requires replacing simple graphs with ‘directed graphs’. To combine these features we could use ‘directed multigraphs’.

But none of these are sufficiently general. It’s also important to consider graphs with colored vertices, to specify different types of agents, and colored edges, to specify different types of channels. This leads us to ‘colored directed multigraphs’.

All these are examples of what we mean by a ‘kind of network’, but none is sufficiently general. More complicated kinds, such as hypergraphs or Petri nets, are likely to become important as we proceed.

Thus, instead of separately studying all these kinds of networks, we introduced a unified notion that subsumes all these variants: a ‘network model’. Namely, given a set $C$ of ‘vertex colors’, a network model is a lax symmetric monoidal functor

$F: \mathbf{S}(C) \to \mathbf{Cat}$

where $\mathbf{S}(C)$ is the free strict symmetric monoidal category on $C$ and $\mathbf{Cat}$ is the category of small categories.

Unpacking this somewhat terrifying definition takes a little work. It simplifies in the special case where $F$ takes values in $\mathbf{Mon},$ the category of monoids. It simplifies further when $C$ is a singleton, since then $\mathbf{S}(C)$ is the groupoid $\mathbf{S},$ where objects are natural numbers and morphisms from $m$ to $n$ are bijections

$\sigma: \{1,\dots,m\} \to \{1,\dots,n\}$

If we impose both these simplifying assumptions, we have what we call a one-colored network model: a lax symmetric monoidal functor

$F : \mathbf{S} \to \mathbf{Mon}$

As we shall see, the network model of simple graphs is a one-colored network model, and so are many other motivating examples. If you like André Joyal’s theory of ‘species’, then one-colored network models should be pretty fun, since they’re species with some extra bells and whistles.

But if you don’t, there’s still no reason to panic. In relatively down-to-earth terms, a one-colored network model amounts to roughly this. If we call elements of $F(n)$ ‘networks with $n$ vertices’, then:

• Since $F(n)$ is a monoid, we can overlay two networks with the same number of vertices and get a new one. We call this operation

$\cup \colon F(n) \times F(n) \to F(n)$

• Since $F$ is a functor, the symmetric group $S_n$ acts on the monoid $F(n).$ Thus, for each $\sigma \in S_n$, we have a monoid automorphism that we call simply

$\sigma \colon F(n) \to F(n)$

• Since $F$ is lax monoidal, we also have an operation

$\sqcup \colon F(m) \times F(n) \to F(m+n)$

We call this operation the disjoint union of networks. In examples like simple graphs, it looks just like what it sounds like.

Unpacking the abstract definition further, we see that these operations obey some equations, which we list in Theorem 11 of our paper. They’re all obvious if you draw pictures of examples… and don’t worry, our paper has a few pictures. (We plan to add more.) For example, the ‘interchange law’

$(g \cup g') \sqcup (h \cup h') = (g \sqcup h) \cup (g' \sqcup h')$

holds whenever $g,g' \in F(m)$ and $h, h' \in F(n).$ This is a nice relationship between overlaying networks and taking their disjoint union.

In Section 2 of our apper we study one-colored network models, and give lots of examples. In Section 3 we describe a systematic procedure for getting one-colored network models from monoids. In Section 4 we study general network models and give examples of these. In Section 5 we describe a category $\mathbf{NetMod}$ of network models, and show that the procedure for getting network models from monoids is functorial. We also make $\mathbf{NetMod}$ into a symmetric monoidal category, and give examples of how to build new networks models by tensoring old ones.

Our main result is that any network model gives a typed operad, also known as a ‘colored operad’. This operad has operations that describe how to stick networks of the given kind together to form larger networks of this kind. This operad has a ‘canonical algebra’, where it acts on networks of the given kind—but the real point is that it has lots of other algebra, where it acts on networks of the given kind equipped with extra structure and properties.

The technical heart of our paper is Section 6, mainly written by Joseph Moeller. This provides the machinery to construct operads from network models in a functorial way. Category theorists should find this section interesting, because because it describes enhancements of the well-known ‘Grothendieck construction’ of the category of elements $\int F$ of a functor

$F: \mathbf{C} \to \mathbf{Cat}$

where $\mathbf{C}$ is any small category. For example, if $\mathbf{C}$ is symmetric monoidal and $F : \mathbf{C} \to (\mathbf{Cat}, \times)$ is lax symmetric monoidal, then we show $\int F$ is symmetric monoidal. Moreover, we show that the construction sending the lax symmetric monoidal functor $F$ to the symmetric monoidal category $\int F$ is functorial.

In Section 7 we apply this machinery to build operads from network models. In Section 8 we describe some algebras of these operads, including an algebra whose elements are networks of range-limited communication channels. In future work we plan to give many more detailed examples, and to explain how these algebras, and the homomorphisms between them, can be used to design and optimize networks.

I want to explain all this in more detail—this is a pretty hasty summary, since I’m busy this week. But for now you can read the paper!

Some posts in this series:

Part 1. CASCADE: the Complex Adaptive System Composition and Design Environment.

Part 2. Metron’s software for system design.

Part 3. Operads: the basic idea.

Part 4. Network operads: an easy example.

Part 5. Algebras of network operads: some easy examples.

Part 6. Network models.

Part 7. Step-by-step compositional design and tasking using commitment networks.

## Applied Category Theory 2018 — Adjoint School

22 October, 2017

There’s a ‘school’ on applied category theory one week before the workshop Applied Category Theory 2018. The deadline for applying to this school is Wednesday November 1st.

Applied Category Theory: Adjoint School: online sessions starting in January 2018, followed by a meeting 23–27 April 2018 at the Lorentz Center in Leiden, the Netherlands. Organized by Bob Coecke (Oxford), Brendan Fong (MIT), Aleks Kissinger (Nijmegen), Martha Lewis (Amsterdam), and Joshua Tan (Oxford).

The name ‘adjoint school’ is a bad pun, but the school should be great. Here’s how it works:

### Overview

The Workshop on Applied Category Theory 2018 takes place in May 2018. A principal goal of this workshop is to bring early career researchers into the applied category theory community. Towards this goal, we are organising the Adjoint School.

The Adjoint School will run from January to April 2018. By the end of the school, each participant will:

• be familiar with the language, goals, and methods of four prominent, current research directions in applied category theory;
• have worked intensively on one of these research directions, mentored by an expert in the field; and
• know other early career researchers interested in applied category theory.

They will then attend the main workshop, well equipped to take part in discussions across the diversity of applied category theory.

### Structure

The Adjoint School comprises (1) an Online Reading Seminar from January to April 2018, and (2) a four day Research Week held at the Lorentz Center, Leiden, The Netherlands, from Monday April 23rd to Thursday April 26th.

In the Online Reading Seminar we will read papers on current research directions in applied category theory. The seminar will consist of eight iterations of a two week block. Each block will have one paper as assigned reading, two participants as co-leaders, and three phases:

• A presentation (over WebEx) on the assigned reading delivered by the two block co-leaders.
• Reading responses and discussion on a private forum, facilitated by Brendan Fong and Nina Otter.
• Publication of a blog post on the n-Category Café written by the co-leaders.

Each participant will be expected to co-lead one block.

The Adjoint School is taught by mentors John Baez, Aleks Kissinger, Martha Lewis, and Pawel Sobocinski. Each mentor will mentor a working group comprising four participants. During the second half of the Online Reading Seminar, these working groups will begin to meet with their mentor (again over video conference) to learn about open research problems related to their reading.

In late April, the participants and the mentors will convene for a four day Research Week at the Lorentz Center. After opening lectures by the mentors, the Research Week will be devoted to collaboration within the working groups. Morning and evening reporting sessions will keep the whole school informed of the research developments of each group.

The following week, participants will attend Applied Category Theory 2018, a discussion-based 60-attendee workshop at the Lorentz Center. Here they will have the chance to meet senior members across the applied category theory community and learn about ongoing research, as well as industry applications.

Following the school, successful working groups will be invited to contribute to a new, to be launched, CUP book series.

Meetings will be on Mondays; we will determine a time depending on the locations of the chosen participants.

### Research projects

John Baez: Semantics for open Petri nets and reaction networks
Petri nets and reaction networks are widely used to describe systems of interacting entities in computer science, chemistry and other fields, but the study of open Petri nets and reaction networks is new, and raise many new questions connected to Lawvere’s “functorial semantics”.
Reading: Fong; Baez and Pollard.

Aleks Kissinger: Unification of the logic of causality
Employ the framework of (pre-)causal categories to unite notions of causality and techniques for causal reasoning which occur in classical statistics, quantum foundations, and beyond.
Reading: Kissinger and Uijlen; Henson, Lal, and Pusey.

Martha Lewis: Compositional approaches to linguistics and cognition
Use compact closed categories to integrate compositional models of meaning with distributed, geometric, and other meaning representations in linguistics and cognitive science.
Reading: Coecke, Sadrzadeh, and Clark; Bolt, Coecke, Genovese, Lewis, Marsden, and Piedeleu.

Pawel Sobocinski: Modelling of open and interconnected systems
Use Carboni and Walters’ bicategories of relations as a multidisciplinary algebra of open and interconnected systems.
Reading: Carboni and Walters; Willems.

### Applications

We hope that each working group will comprise both participants who specialise in category theory and in the relevant application field. As a prerequisite, those participants specialising in category theory should feel comfortable with the material found in Categories for the Working Mathematician or its equivalent; those specialising in applications should have a similar graduate-level introduction.

To apply, please fill out the form here. You will be asked to upload a single PDF file containing the following information:

• Your contact information and educational history.
• A brief paragraph explaining your interest in this course.
• A paragraph or two describing one of your favorite topics in category theory, or your application field.
• A ranked list of the papers you would most like to present, together with an explanation of your preferences. Note that the paper you present determines which working group you will join.

You may add your CV if you wish.

Anyone is welcome to apply, although preference may be given to current graduate students and postdocs. Women and members of other underrepresented groups within applied category theory are particularly encouraged to apply.

Some support will be available to help with the costs (flights, accommodation, food, childcare) of attending the Research Week and the Workshop on Applied Category Theory; please indicate in your application if you would like to be considered for such support.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Brendan Fong (bfo at mit dot edu) or Nina Otter (otter at maths dot ox dot ac dot uk).

Application deadline: November 1st, 2017.

## Applied Category Theory at UCR (Part 2)

21 September, 2017

I’m running a special session on applied category theory, and now the program is available:

Applied category theory, Fall Western Sectional Meeting of the AMS, 4-5 November 2017, U.C. Riverside.

This is going to be fun.

My former student Brendan Fong is now working with David Spivak at MIT, and they’re both coming. My collaborator John Foley at Metron is also coming: we’re working on the CASCADE project for designing networked systems.

Dmitry Vagner is coming from Duke: he wrote a paper with David and Eugene Lerman on operads and open dynamical systems. Christina Vaisilakopoulou, who has worked with David and Patrick Schultz on dynamical systems, has just joined our group at UCR, so she will also be here. And the three of them have worked with Ryan Wisnesky on algebraic databases. Ryan will not be here, but his colleague Peter Gates will: together with David they have a startup called Categorical Informatics, which uses category theory to build sophisticated databases.

That’s not everyone—for example, most of my students will be speaking at this special session, and other people too—but that gives you a rough sense of some people involved. The conference is on a weekend, but John Foley and David Spivak and Brendan Fong and Dmitry Vagner are staying on for longer, so we’ll have some long conversations… and Brendan will explain decorated corelations in my Tuesday afternoon network theory seminar.

Here’s the program. Click on talk titles to see abstracts. For a multi-author talk, the person with the asterisk after their name is doing the talking. All the talks will be in Room 268 of the Highlander Union Building or ‘HUB’.

### Saturday November 4, 2017, 9:00 a.m.-10:50 a.m.

9:00 a.m.
A higher-order temporal logic for dynamical systems.
David I. Spivak, MIT

10:00 a.m.
Algebras of open dynamical systems on the operad of wiring diagrams.
Dmitry Vagner*, Duke University
David I. Spivak, MIT
Eugene Lerman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

10:30 a.m.
Abstract dynamical systems.
Christina Vasilakopoulou*, University of California, Riverside
David Spivak, MIT
Patrick Schultz, MIT

### Saturday November 4, 2017, 3:00 p.m.-5:50 p.m.

3:00 p.m.
Black boxes and decorated corelations.
Brendan Fong, MIT

4:00 p.m.
Compositional modelling of open reaction networks.
Blake S. Pollard*, University of California, Riverside
John C. Baez, University of California, Riverside

4:30 p.m.
A bicategory of coarse-grained Markov processes.
Kenny Courser, University of California, Riverside

5:00 p.m.
A bicategorical syntax for pure state qubit quantum mechanics.
Daniel M. Cicala, University of California, Riverside

5:30 p.m.
Open systems in classical mechanics.
Adam Yassine, University of California Riverside

### Sunday November 5, 2017, 9:00 a.m.-10:50 a.m.

9:00 a.m.
Controllability and observability: diagrams and duality.
Jason Erbele, Victor Valley College

9:30 a.m.
Frobenius monoids, weak bimonoids, and corelations.
Brandon Coya, University of California, Riverside

10:00 a.m.
Compositional design and tasking of networks.
John D. Foley*, Metron, Inc.
John C. Baez, University of California, Riverside
Joseph Moeller, University of California, Riverside
Blake S. Pollard, University of California, Riverside

10:30 a.m.
Operads for modeling networks.
Joseph Moeller*, University of California, Riverside
John Foley, Metron Inc.
John C. Baez, University of California, Riverside
Blake S. Pollard, University of California, Riverside

### Sunday November 5, 2017, 2:00 p.m.-4:50 p.m.

2:00 p.m.
Reeb graph smoothing via cosheaves.
Vin de Silva, Department of Mathematics, Pomona College

3:00 p.m.
Knowledge representation in bicategories of relations.
Evan Patterson*, Stanford University, Statistics Department

3:30 p.m.
The multiresolution analysis of flow graphs.
Steve Huntsman*, BAE Systems

4:00 p.m.
Data modeling and integration using the open source tool Algebraic Query Language (AQL).
Peter Y. Gates*, Categorical Informatics
Ryan Wisnesky, Categorical Informatics