Abstract
A significant contribution to the analysis of certain aspects of the communicating processes model was made by D. Benson’s proposal to view incompletely specified nondeterministic processes as modules over certain semirings, and dually as comodules over corresponding coalgebras. The effectiveness of the proposal in treating the synthesis of such processes under mutual communication depended on the good behaviour of these algebraic systems with respect to tensor products. The aim of the paper is to draw attension to the algebraic theory underlying Benson’s proposal, the theory of entropic algebras. Working with entropic algebras guarantees that tensor products are sufficiently well-behaved to make Benson’s theory work.
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