A Language for Configuring Multi-level Specifications

This paper shows how systems can be built from their component parts with specified sharing. Its principle contribution is a modular language for configuring systems. A configuration is a description in the new language of how a system is constructed hierarchically from specifications of its component parts. Category theory has been used to represent the composition of specifications that share a component part by constructing colimits of diagrams. We reformulated this application of category theory to view both configured specifications and their diagrams as algebraic presentations of presheaves. The framework of presheaves leads naturally to a configuration language that expresses structuring from instances of specifications, and also incorporates a new notion of instance reduction to extract the component instances from a particular configuration. The language now expresses the hierarchical structuring of multi-level configured specifications. The syntax is simple because it is independent of any specification language; structuring a diagram to represent a configuration is simple because there is no need to calculate a colimit; and combining specifications is simple because structuring is by configuration morphisms with no need to flatten either specifications or their diagrams to calculate colimits

The Relative Power of Composite Loop Agreement Tasks

Loop agreement is a family of wait-free tasks that includes set agreement and simplex agreement, and was used to prove the undecidability of wait-free solvability of distributed tasks by read/write memory. Herlihy and Rajsbaum defined the algebraic signature of a loop agreement task, which consists of a group and a distinguished element. They used the algebraic signature to characterize the relative power of loop agreement tasks. In particular, they showed that one task implements another exactly when there is a homomorphism between their respective signatures sending one distinguished element to the other. In this paper, we extend the previous result by defining the composition of multiple loop agreement tasks to create a new one with the same combined power. We generalize the original algebraic characterization of relative power to compositions of tasks. In this way, we can think of loop agreement tasks in terms of their basic building blocks. We also investigate a category-theoretic perspective of loop agreement by defining a category of loops, showing that the algebraic signature is a functor, and proving that our definition of task composition is the "correct" one, in a categorical sense.Comment: 18 page

Van Kampen Colimits and Path Uniqueness

Fibred semantics is the foundation of the model-instance pattern of software engineering. Software models can often be formalized as objects of presheaf topoi, i.e, categories of objects that can be represented as algebras as well as coalgebras, e.g., the category of directed graphs. Multimodeling requires to construct colimits of models, decomposition is given by pullback. Compositionality requires an exact interplay of these operations, i.e., diagrams must enjoy the Van Kampen property. However, checking the validity of the Van Kampen property algorithmically based on its definition is often impossible. In this paper we state a necessary and sufficient yet efficiently checkable condition for the Van Kampen property to hold in presheaf topoi. It is based on a uniqueness property of path-like structures within the defining congruence classes that make up the colimiting cocone of the models. We thus add to the statement "Being Van Kampen is a Universal Property" by Heindel and Soboci\'{n}ski the fact that the Van Kampen property reveals a presheaf-based structural uniqueness feature

Shaded Tangles for the Design and Verification of Quantum Programs (Extended Abstract)

We give a scheme for interpreting shaded tangles as quantum programs, with the property that isotopic tangles yield equivalent programs. We analyze many known quantum programs in this way -- including entanglement manipulation and error correction -- and in each case present a fully-topological formal verification, yielding in several cases substantial new insight into how the program works. We also use our methods to identify several new or generalized procedures.Comment: In Proceedings QPL 2017, arXiv:1802.0973

Presenting Distributive Laws

Distributive laws of a monad T over a functor F are categorical tools for specifying algebra-coalgebra interaction. They proved to be important for solving systems of corecursive equations, for the specification of well-behaved structural operational semantics and, more recently, also for enhancements of the bisimulation proof method. If T is a free monad, then such distributive laws correspond to simple natural transformations. However, when T is not free it can be rather difficult to prove the defining axioms of a distributive law. In this paper we describe how to obtain a distributive law for a monad with an equational presentation from a distributive law for the underlying free monad. We apply this result to show the equivalence between two different representations of context-free languages

Verifying Monadic Second-Order Properties of Graph Programs

The core challenge in a Hoare- or Dijkstra-style proof system for graph programs is in defining a weakest liberal precondition construction with respect to a rule and a postcondition. Previous work addressing this has focused on assertion languages for first-order properties, which are unable to express important global properties of graphs such as acyclicity, connectedness, or existence of paths. In this paper, we extend the nested graph conditions of Habel, Pennemann, and Rensink to make them equivalently expressive to monadic second-order logic on graphs. We present a weakest liberal precondition construction for these assertions, and demonstrate its use in verifying non-local correctness specifications of graph programs in the sense of Habel et al.Comment: Extended version of a paper to appear at ICGT 201

Some problems of infinite regress in social-choice models: a category theory solution

An analysis of the infinite regress that appears in the statement of Gauthier's bargaining approach to social choice. The author shows how category theory provides the tools for constructing the appropriate bargaining models by furnishing a setting for the concepts of continuity, limits, and fixed points.Game theory