3 ms·
Slava's Monoid Zoo
- voidUpdate 6mo ago> "Can you see a way to transform a string of 8 apples "" into a string of 10 apples ""?" Am I missing something? The only rules we have are BAB -> AAA and BBB -> BB, and we start with only A, no B, so neither of those rules can be used, so the answer is no? EDIT: Ah, looks like you cant put emoji in HN comments. Imagine there's apples in there
- Phemist 6mo agoThe relations are bi-directional. So you can change AAA -> BAB and BB -> BBB as well.
- voidUpdate 6mo agoOh, I see. That makes sense
- dhosek 6mo agoYeah, that was the secret sauce that left me a bit confused
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- entaloneralie 6mo agoI'm too scared to leave the comfy world of commutative monoids.
- Sesse__ 6mo agoIs the word problem easier if the monoids are commutative? (Or even trivial? I haven't thought deeply about it.)
- hyperpape 6mo agoI haven't previously thought about this, but I think words over a commutative monoid are equivalent to a vector of non-negative integers, at which point you have vector addition systems, and I believe those are decidable, though still computationally incredibly hard: https://www.quantamagazine.org/an-easy-sounding-problem-yields-numbers-too-big-for-our-universe-20231204/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/an-easy-sounding-problem-yiel....
- Sesse__ 6mo agoThanks, that's an interesting tidbit! (The whole thing made me think about applications to SQL query optimizers, although I'm not sure if it's practically useful for anything.)
- thecatwentup 6mo ago[dead]