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

## TL;DR

This paper provides a category-theoretic framework for Gandy's principles, modeling locally deterministic updates in computation without fixing a specific state category, and proves such updates are computable.

## Contribution

It introduces axioms for categories of states and characterizes computable updating functors within this abstract setting.

## Key findings

- Every updating functor satisfying the axioms is computable.
- The framework generalizes Gandy's principles using category theory.
- Provides an abstract account of computation updates via functors.

## Abstract

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.

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Source: https://tomesphere.com/paper/1904.10109