A theory for game theories

International audienceGame semantics is a valuable source of fully abstract models of programming languages or proof theories based on categories of so-called games and strategies. However, there are many variants of this technique, whose interrelationships largely remain to be elucidated. This raises the question: what is a category of games and strategies? Our central idea, taken from the first author's PhD thesis, is that positions and moves in a game should be morphisms in a base category: playing move m in position f consists in factoring f through m, the new position being the other factor. Accordingly, we provide a general construction which, from a selection of "legal moves" in an almost arbitrary category, produces a category of games and strategies, together with subcategories of deterministic and winning strategies. As our running example, we instantiate our construction to obtain the standard category of Hyland-Ong games subject to the switching condition. The extension of our framework to games without the switching condition is handled in the first author's PhD thesis

The Interval Domain: A Matchmaker for aCTL and aPCTL

AbstractWe present aPCTL, a version of PCTL with an action-based semantics which coincides with the ordinary PCTL in case of a sole action type. We point out what aspects of aPCTL may be improved for its application as a probabilistic logic in a tool modeling large probabilistic system. We give a non-standard semantics to the action-based temporal logical aCTL, where the propositional clauses are interpreted in a fuzzy and the modalities in a probabilistic way; the until-construct is evaluated as a least fixed-point over these meanings. We view aCTL formulas ⊘ as templates for aPCTL formulas (which still need vectors of thresholds as annotations for all subformulas which are path formulas). Since [⊘]s, our non-standard meaning of ø at state s, is an interval [a, b], we may craft aPCTL formulas ø from using the information a and b respectively. This results in two aPCTL formulas ø and ø1. This translation defines a critical region of such thresholds for ⊘ in the following sense: if a > 0 then a satisfies the aPCTL formula ø1 dually, if b < 1 then s does not satisfy the formula ø1. Thus, any interesting probabilistic dynamics of aPCTL formulas with “pattern” ⊘ has to happen within the n-dimensional interval determined by out non-standard aCTL semantics [⊘].we would like to thank Martín Hötzel Escardó for suggesting to look at the interval domain at the LICS'97 meeting in Warsaw. He also pointed to work in his PhD thesis about the universality of I. we also acknowledge Marta Kwaitkowska, Christel Baier, Rance Cleaveland, and Scott Smolka for fruitful discussion on this subject matter

Failures, Finiteness and Full Abstraction

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Intensional and Extensional Semantics of Bounded and Unbounded Nondeterminism

We give extensional and intensional characterizations of nondeterministic functional programs: as structure preserving functions between biorders, and as nondeterministic sequential algorithms on ordered concrete data structures which compute them. A fundamental result establishes that the extensional and intensional representations of non-deterministic programs are equivalent, by showing how to construct a unique sequential algorithm which computes a given monotone and stable function, and describing the conditions on sequential algorithms which correspond to continuity with respect to each order. We illustrate by defining may and must-testing denotational semantics for a sequential functional language with bounded and unbounded choice operators. We prove that these are computationally adequate, despite the non-continuity of the must-testing semantics of unbounded nondeterminism. In the bounded case, we prove that our continuous models are fully abstract with respect to may and must-testing by identifying a simple universal type, which may also form the basis for models of the untyped lambda-calculus. In the unbounded case we observe that our model contains computable functions which are not denoted by terms, by identifying a further "weak continuity" property of the definable elements, and use this to establish that it is not fully abstract

FAITHFUL IDEAL MODELS FOR RECURSIVE POLYMORPHIC TYPES

We explore ideal models for a programming language with recursive polymorphic types, variants of the model studied by MacQueen, Plotkin, and Sethi. The use of suitable ideals yields a close fit between models and programming language. Two of our semantics of type expressions are faithful, in the sense that programs that behave identically in all contexts have exactly the same types

Fully abstract denotational models for nonuniform concurrent languages

AbstractThis paper investigates full abstraction of denotational model w.r.t. operational ones for two concurrent languages. The languages are nonuniform in the sense that the meaning of atomic statements generally depends on the current state. The first language, L1, has parallel composition but no communication, whereas the second one, L2, has CSP-like communications in addition. For each of Li (i = 1, 2), an operational model Oi is introduced in terms of a Plotkin-style transition system, while a denotational model Di for Li is defined compositionally using interpreted operations of the language, with meanings of recursive programs as fixed points in appropriate complete metric spaces. The full abstraction is shown by means of a context with parallel composition: Given two statements s1 and s2 with different denotational meanings, a suitable statement T is constructed such that the operational meanings of s1 ∥ T and s2 ∥ T are distinct. A combinatorial method for constructing such T is proposed. Thereby the full abstraction of D1 and D2 w.r.t. O1 and O2, respectively, is established. That is, Di is most abstract of those models C which are compositional and satisfy Oi = α ∘ C for some abstraction function α (i = 1, 2)