Petri nets and Span(Graph)

I have been thinking about Petri nets since a student of mine, Filippo Schiavio, has just written an interpreter for executing expressions in Span(Graph), with a graphic output (using the graphic package Graphviz). It seemed an idea to imitate some Petri net examples.

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Categories and automata

I have just finished a course here in Como on categories and automata, a fair part of which was about what I called "Reticular Categories" - symmetric strict monoidal categories, each object of which has a commutative frobenius algebra structure, the structures being compatible with the tensor.
(Braided reticular categories were the subject of our recent Arxiv article called Tangled Circuits.)

I believe reticular categories can be appreciated at an undergraduate level - which is where I taught the course. They will be part of a book we are writing to  follow-up Categories and Computer Science.