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Henry Story (Aug 08 2021 at 15:04):I am reaching part 4 of the Polynomial Functors Course: Dynamics of Polynomials II and trying to also keep up with the book by @David Spivak and @Nelson Niu . Poly as a dynamical system seems to have many of the properties needed for actor systems.
Henry Story (Aug 08 2021 at 15:22):Course 3 and 4 make the case for Poly being very good for dynamical systems. The end of chapter 2 shows how something like a supervision hierarchy can work.
This made me wonder if this could not be just the right kind of mathematics for actor systems like Akka.
Henry Story (Aug 08 2021 at 16:20):Some interesting features of Actors:
Henry Story (Aug 08 2021 at 16:25):Carl Hewitt who invented the actor model wrote up a history in 2010 of actor systems https://twitter.com/bblfish/status/1358103100104572930 .
Really great overview of the history of computing and the emergence of the Actor model by Carl Hewitt. "Actor Model of Computation: Scalable Robust Information Systems" https://arxiv.org/abs/1008.1459 ( @ThePatHayes and @v_sassone's works are cited) "The Actor Model integrated:" https://twitter.com/bblfish/status/1358103100104572930/photo/1
- The 🐟 BabelFish (@bblfish) Henry Story (Aug 08 2021 at 16:29):I had found some very interesting links between Session types and actors as in here https://twitter.com/bblfish/status/1358462175174664192
The EffPi plugin to the #Scala3 compiler connects to mCRL2 toolset which can verify Async Protocols for being deadlock-free, reactive, responsive, ... mCRL2 offers "tools for linearisation, simulation, state-space exploration..." https://mcrl2.org/web/user_manual/index.html https://twitter.com/bblfish/status/1358462175174664192/photo/1
- The 🐟 BabelFish (@bblfish) Henry Story (Aug 08 2021 at 16:32):Anyway, perhaps others are deeper into Poly that me, and have some insight on whether Actors could be an interesting application area?
Nick Smith (Aug 09 2021 at 02:19):Poly is a model for distributed systems. Actors are also a (much more basic) model for distributed systems. I don’t think “Poly can be applied to actors”. That’s like saying Turing Machines can be applied to lambda calculus!
Nick Smith (Aug 09 2021 at 02:27):Poly is also more broadly applicable. For one thing, it seems equally adept at modelling relational databases. What is the connection between databases and dynamical systems? Both can be seen as graphs, to start. One is a data graph, the other is a state graph.
Henry Story (Aug 09 2021 at 06:26):Mh, it looks like Poly could be useful for modelling the web then as I argue here.
Henry Story (Aug 09 2021 at 19:49):Btw, we find very similar wiring diagrams for streams in Akka. But I guess such diagrams are due to symmetric monoidal categories rather than to Poly.
https://twitter.com/bblfish/status/1397967139886227459
From the diagrams in the #Akka stream documentation it is quite clear that these must be Symmetric Monoidal Categories. I wonder if they were designed as such? #Scala https://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/current/stream/stream-composition.html https://twitter.com/bblfish/status/1397967139886227459/photo/1
- The 🐟 BabelFish (@bblfish)