

Quantum Mechanical Words and Mathematical Organisms - MichaelAO
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/quantum-mechanical-words-and-mathematical-organisms/

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ejenk
From the article, you'd think these ideas were invented by Coecke and Chaitin
from whole cloth.

Graphical calculi for monoidal categories date back to Kelly and Laplaza
(1980), with later refinements by Joyal-Street and Yetter. In incipient form,
such diagrams were used by Penrose, with applications in physics, in 1971
([http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/Penrose.pdf](http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/Penrose.pdf)).
The use of categorical methods in linguistics was pioneered by Lambek and can
be seen as early as 1958
([http://ling.umd.edu/~alxndrw/CGReadings/lambek-58.pdf](http://ling.umd.edu/~alxndrw/CGReadings/lambek-58.pdf)).
While Coecke has done important work in these areas, it's incredibly
misleading to paint these ideas as his alone.

Likewise, evolutionary algorithms have a long history, beginning at least as
far back as Barricelli in 1954. Since I know nothing about Chaitin's work on
this, I can't say to what extent his work is novel, but there is a vast
historical context one should be aware of when talking about simulating
evolution.

