Steve Stevenson <steve@cs.clemson.edu> asked
I am interested to find an article or book that is a category- theoretic redevelopment of "classical" automata. I'd like to find something that graduate students could use if they had already had an automata course and now would retrace that same development using category-theoretic vocabulary and means.
Dear Steve, I'd be interested in such pointers as well, especially since "classical automata theory" is a rather horrible mess. You may want to check out - Edwin Stewart Bainbridge's thesis "A unified minimal realization theory with duality", PhD Thesis, U. of Michigan, 1972. - R. Betti, "Automi e categorie chiuse" Boll. Un. Mat. Ital. A (5)\(1980), 44--58 - Kasangian, Kelly, and Rossi "Cofibrations and the realization of non-deterministic automata", Cahiers Topologie Geom. Diff. 24, 1 (1983), 23--46. Also, Mark William Hopkins presents some interesting ideas on his WEB-page <http://www.uwm.edu/~whopkins/compalg/index.html>. A pointer to the coalgebraic view of automata is Jan Rutten's page <http://homepages.cwi.nl/~janr/papers>. You may want to start with "Automata and coinduction (an exercise in coalgebra). Technical Report SEN-R9803", which is available for downloading. Cheers, -- Juergen -- Juergen Koslowski If I don't see you no more on this world ITI, TU Braunschweig I'll meet you on the next one koslowj@iti.cs.tu-bs.de and don't be late! http://www.iti.cs.tu-bs.de/~koslowj Jimi Hendrix (Voodoo Child, SR)