Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!husc6!linus!philabs!hen3ry!dpb
From: dpb@hen3ry.Philips.Com (Paul Benjamin)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Category Theory in AI
Message-ID: <33831@philabs.Philips.Com>
Date: 22 Aug 88 15:35:13 GMT
References: <32864@philabs.Philips.Com> <2361@atr-la.atr.junet> <1572@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk>
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Reply-To: dpb@hen3ry.UUCP (Paul Benjamin)
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In article <1572@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> jack@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin) writes:
>I can't imagine what category theory has to contribute to knowledge
>representation (though I can just about imagine it helping to describe
>neural nets in a more abstract way). Can the philabs people say more
>about what they're up to?

Well, not really, in a public forum.  But Mike Lowry of the Kestrel
Institute has pointed out that a representation can be viewed as
a category, and a shift of representation as a morphism.  The
question of whether this insight is very productive is open, but at
least it gives us a formal notion of representation, and we've
built on this some formal notions of abstraction and learning.
We'll let you know if this turns out to be fruitful.

Paul Benjamin