# A Category Theoretic Interpretation of Gandy's Principles for Mechanisms

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.10109 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10109/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 Apr 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Physical Computing: A Category Theoretic Perspective on Physical Computation and System Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00392/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Based on Gandy's principles for models of computation we give category-theoretic axioms describing locally deterministic updates to finite objects. Rather than fixing a particular category of states, we describe what properties such a category should have. The computation is modelled by a functor that encodes updating the computation, and we give an abstract account of such functors. We show that every updating functor satisfying our conditions is computable.