semirings ========== Haskellers are usually familiar with monoids and semigroups. A monoid has an appending operation `<>` or `mappend` and an identity element `mempty`. A semigroup has an append `<>`, but does not require an `mempty` element. A Semiring has two appending operations, 'plus' and 'times', and two respective identity elements, 'zero' and 'one'. More formally, A semiring R is a set equipped with two binary relations + and *, such that: - (R, +) is a commutative monoid with identity element 0: - (a + b) + c = a + (b + c) - 0 + a = a + 0 = a - a + b = b + a - (R, *) is a monoid with identity element 1: - (a * b) * c = a * (b * c) - 1 * a = a * 1 = a - Multiplication left and right distributes over addition - a * (b + c) = (a * b) + (a * c) - (a + b) * c = (a * c) + (b * c) - Multiplication by '0' annihilates R: - 0 * a = a * 0 = 0 *-semirings =========== A *-semiring (pron. "star-semiring") is any semiring with an additional operation 'star' (read as "asteration"), such that: - star a = 1 + a * star a = 1 + star a * a A derived operation called "aplus" can be defined in terms of star by: - star :: a -> a - star a = 1 + aplus a - aplus :: a -> a - aplus a = a * star a As such, a minimal instance of the typeclass 'Star' requires only 'star' or 'aplus' to be defined. use cases ========= semirings themselves are useful as a way to express that a type is both a commutative and associative monoid. *-semirings are useful in a number of applications; such as matrix algebra, regular expressions, kleene algebras, graph theory, tropical algebra, dataflow analysis, power series, linear recurrence relations. Some relevant (informal) reading material: http://stedolan.net/research/semirings.pdf http://r6.ca/blog/20110808T035622Z.html https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2016/04/05/the-network-reliability-problem-and-star-semirings/ additional credit ====== Some of the code in this library was lifted directly from the Haskell library 'semiring-num'.