Open Games: the Long Road to Practical Applications

The third talk in the ACT@UCR seminar will be Jules Hedges talking about open games! He’ll talk on Wednesday April 15th at 5 pm UTC, which is 10 am in California, or 1 pm on the east coast of the United States, or 6 pm in England. You can see his talk live via Zoom, here:

https://ucr.zoom.us/j/607160601

We’ll have discussions during his talk and afterwards at the Category Theory Community Server. I recommend coming 15 minutes early for cookies and coffee.

You can already see the slides here. Later his talk will be put on YouTube.

• April 15, Jules Hedges: Open games: the long road to practical applications.

Abstract. I will talk about open games, and the closely related concepts of lenses/optics and open learners. My goal is to report on the successes and failures of an ongoing effort to try to realise the often-claimed benefits of categories and compositionality in actual practice. I will introduce what little theory is needed along the way. Here are some things I plan to talk about:

— Lenses as an abstraction of the chain rule

— Comb diagrams

— Surprising applications of open games: Bayesian inference, value function iteration

— The state of tool support

— Open games in their natural habitat: microeconomics

— Sociological aspects of working with economics