Asynchronous games 2: the true concurrency of innocence

In game semantics, the higher-order value passing mechanisms of the lambda-calculus are decomposed as sequences of atomic actions exchanged by a Player and its Opponent. Seen from this angle, game semantics is reminiscent of trace semantics in concurrency theory, where a process is identified to the sequences of requests it generates in the course of time. Asynchronous game semantics is an attempt to bridge the gap between the two subjects, and to see mainstream game semantics as a refined and interactive form of trace semantics. Asynchronous games are positional games played on Mazurkiewicz traces, which reformulate (and generalize) the familiar notion of arena game. The interleaving semantics of lambda-terms, expressed as innocent strategies, may be analyzed in this framework, in the perspective of true concurrency. The analysis reveals that innocent strategies are positional strategies regulated by forward and backward confluence properties. This captures, we believe, the essence of innocence. We conclude the article by defining a non uniform variant of the lambda-calculus, in which the game semantics of a lambda-term is formulated directly as a trace semantics, performing the syntactic exploration or parsing of that lambda-term

Categorical Term Rewriting: Monads and Modularity

Laboratory for Foundations of Computer ScienceTerm rewriting systems are widely used throughout computer science as they provide an abstract model of computation while retaining a comparatively simple syntax and semantics. In order to reason within large term rewriting systems, structuring operations are used to build large term rewriting systems from smaller ones. Of particular interest is whether key properties are modular, that is, if the components of a structured term rewriting system satisfy a property, then does the term rewriting system as a whole? A body of literature addresses this problem, but most of the results and proofs depend on strong syntactic conditions and do not easily generalize. Although many specific modularity results are known, a coherent framework which explains the underlying principles behind these results is lacking. This thesis posits that part of the problem is the usual, concrete and syntax-oriented semantics of term rewriting systems, and that a semantics is needed which on the one hand elides unnecessary syntactic details but on the other hand still possesses enough expressive power to model the key concepts arising from the term structure, such as substitutions, layers, redexes etc. Drawing on the concepts of category theory, such a semantics is proposed, based on the concept of a monad, generalising the very elegant treatment of equational presentations in category theory. The theoretical basis of this work is the theory of enriched monads. It is shown how structuring operations are modelled on the level of monads, and that the semantics is compositional (it preserves the structuring operations). Modularity results can now be obtained directly at the level of combining monads without recourse to the syntax at all. As an application and demonstration of the usefulness of this approach, two modularity results for the disjoint union of two term rewriting systems are proven, the modularity of confluence (Toyama's theorem) and the modularity of strong normalization for a particular class of term rewriting systems (non-collapsing term rewriting systems). The proofs in the categorical setting provide a mild generalisation of these results

Axiomatic Rewriting Theory IV - A stability theorem in Rewriting Theory

One key property of the -calculus is that there exists a minimal computation (the head-reduction) M e \Gamma! V from a -term M to the set of its headnormal forms. Minimality here means categorical "reflectivity " i.e. that every reduction path M f \Gamma! W to a head-normal form W factors (up to redex permutation) to a path M e \Gamma! V h \Gamma! W . This paper establishes a stability `a la Berry or poly-reflectivity theorem [D, La, T] which extends the minimality property to Rewriting Systems with critical pairs. The theorem is proved in the setting of Axiomatic Rewriting Systems where sets of head-normal forms are characterised by their frontier property in the spirit of [GK]. 1 Axiomatic Rewriting Theory Rewriting is a versatile model of computation which stretches from Turing Machines and Petri nets to - calculus and ß-calculus. This versatility has generated in the past a variety of theories which are still poorly interconnected. Axiomatic Rewriting Theory [GLM, M, 1,..