categories: Re: Simplicial versus (cubical with connections) Ronnie Brown ronnie.profbrown@btinternet.com One basic intuition is that cubes are products. Yet almost none of the combinatorial toposes commonly called “cubical sets” have that feature. Is there some profound disadvantage in allowing projection maps to have their universal property (yielding diagonal maps, etc)? If so, I have never seen it spelled out. An advantage to having finite products in a site is that the (iterated) pathspace functor has a right adjoint, leading to a very natural construction of Eilenberg-Mac Lane spaces. Dan Kan told me that the reason for his switch was that cubical groups do not have the extension property (i.e., the Kan property), as simplicial groups do. But later I realized that there is ambiguity about what “cubical” means. Since these combinatorial categories are usually toposes, some light is shed on their particularity by determining what kind of structure they classify (in the established categorical sense, e.g.,the simplicial topos classifies total orders with distinct endpoints, and a simple cubical example classifies strictly bipointed objects). Concretely, there are many different theories of algebraic structure for which the unit interval is a model, and having chosen one, this structure should be preserved by geometric realization. Bill Lawvere [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]