Hello,

Sorry for the delay.

On Sat, Apr 7, 2012 at 11:23 PM, Ronan Lamy <[email protected]> wrote:
> Le samedi 07 avril 2012 à 21:55 +0300, Sergiu Ivanov a écrit :
>>
>> I am pleasantly surprise to announce that I have actually found a
>> paper which seems to be about (semi-)automatic diagram chasing!
>>
>>   A mechanically assisted constructive proof in category theory
>>   James A. Altucher and Prakash Panangaden
>>
>>   http://www.springerlink.com/content/f118u0u0338470u5/
>>
>> The abstract looks promising.
>
> It's from 1990 though, and doesn't seem to have had a lot of follow-up.
>
> http://users.cecs.anu.edu.au/~okeefe/work/fcat4cats04.pdf might be more
> current.

Thank you, Ronan!

I have more or less read both articles and it looks like they aren't
going to be of much help either for the project I have drafted for
this summer or for the eventual implementation of diagram chasing.

The reason is as follows: both articles focus on proof checkers like
Isabelle [0] or Nuprl [1].  The authors construct a formal framework
for categories and then formulate concrete situations and ask concrete
questions.  While this is all very nice and cool, it has two major
disadvantages:

* the actual reasoning work is done by the corresponding proof
  checker, and it is too general to directly adapt the ideas in it and
  use them in SymPy;

* neither of the papers actually speaks of diagram chasing in a
  general setup.

I'm not yet sure as to how much _exactly_ information useful for the
category theory module can be extracted from these articles, but it
looks like they are not that useful, after all :-(

Sergiu

[0] http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/hvg/isabelle/
[1] http://www.nuprl.org/

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