This blog post is very well written. It is also the platonic ideal of "articles about category theory that I love to hate."<p>The article concludes by saying:<p>> Hopefully I’ve convinced you that Chu spaces are indeed a mathematical abstraction worth knowing. I appreciate in particular how they provide such a concrete way of understanding otherwise slippery things.<p>But, I'm not convinced. What problems do Chu spaces allow me to solve that I couldn't solve before? Do they at least facilitate solving some problems more quickly or easily? If not – how do they help me understand the various "slippery things" better? How does this improved understanding manifest itself in terms of novel theorems (or novel proofs of known theorems)?<p>For most abstractions in mainstream mathematics, I can give plenty of concrete answers to those questions. But having read this article, I still don't know the answers for Chu spaces.<p>(I would further suggest that if someone is trying to sell you on a mathematical abstraction, but can't answer those questions convincingly, you should reject the claim that the abstraction has value.)
Very similar to the Channel Theory of Barwise and Seligman.<p><a href="https://jacoblee.net/occamseraser/2011/06/06/introduction-to-channel-theory/" rel="nofollow">https://jacoblee.net/occamseraser/2011/06/06/introduction-to...</a>
I was skeptical until I saw the applications, especially representing groups. Not entirely sure how distinct these ideas are from studying power sets or how to really think about what "color" means here.<p>It's a pretty cool abstraction. No idea how to use it but worth thinking about.
I was not familiar with this. The wikipedia article helps some, and this page has lots of links:<p><a href="http://chu.stanford.edu/guide.html" rel="nofollow">http://chu.stanford.edu/guide.html</a>
I did some experiments with chu spaces some years ago in trying to understand their application to physics simulation, I'd forgotten most of what I learned, cool to see this on HN.