Rewriting modulo symmetric monoidal structure

String diagrams are a powerful and intuitive graphical syntax for terms of symmetric monoidal categories (SMCs). They find many applications in computer science and are becoming increasingly relevant in other fields such as physics and control theory. An important role in many such approaches is played by equational theories of diagrams, typically oriented and applied as rewrite rules. This paper lays a comprehensive foundation for this form of rewriting. We interpret diagrams combinatorially as typed hypergraphs and establish the precise correspondence between diagram rewriting modulo the laws of SMCs on the one hand and double pushout (DPO) rewriting of hypergraphs, subject to a soundness condition called convexity, on the other. This result rests on a more general characterisation theorem in which we show that typed hypergraph DPO rewriting amounts to diagram rewriting modulo the laws of SMCs with a chosen special Frobenius structure. We illustrate our approach with a proof of termination for the theory of non-commutative bimonoids

Rewriting modulo symmetric monoidal structure

String diagrams are a powerful and intuitive graphical syntax for terms of symmetric monoidal categories (SMCs). They find many applications in computer science and are becoming increasingly relevant in other fields such as physics and control theory.An important role in many such approaches is played by equational theories of diagrams, typically oriented and applied as rewrite rules. This paper lays a comprehensive foundation for this form of rewriting. We interpret diagrams combinatorially as typed hypergraphs and establish the precise correspondence between diagram rewriting modulo the laws of SMCs on the one hand and double pushout (DPO) rewriting of hypergraphs, subject to a soundness condition called convexity, on the other. This result rests on a more general characterisation theorem in which we show that typed hypergraph DPO rewriting amounts to diagram rewriting modulo the laws of SMCs with a chosen special Frobenius structure.We illustrate our approach with a proof of termination for the theory of non-commutative bimonoids

Towards 3-Dimensional Rewriting Theory

String rewriting systems have proved very useful to study monoids. In good cases, they give finite presentations of monoids, allowing computations on those and their manipulation by a computer. Even better, when the presentation is confluent and terminating, they provide one with a notion of canonical representative of the elements of the presented monoid. Polygraphs are a higher-dimensional generalization of this notion of presentation, from the setting of monoids to the much more general setting of n-categories. One of the main purposes of this article is to give a progressive introduction to the notion of higher-dimensional rewriting system provided by polygraphs, and describe its links with classical rewriting theory, string and term rewriting systems in particular. After introducing the general setting, we will be interested in proving local confluence for polygraphs presenting 2-categories and introduce a framework in which a finite 3-dimensional rewriting system admits a finite number of critical pairs

The Structure of First-Order Causality

Game semantics describe the interactive behavior of proofs by interpreting formulas as games on which proofs induce strategies. Such a semantics is introduced here for capturing dependencies induced by quantifications in first-order propositional logic. One of the main difficulties that has to be faced during the elaboration of this kind of semantics is to characterize definable strategies, that is strategies which actually behave like a proof. This is usually done by restricting the model to strategies satisfying subtle combinatorial conditions, whose preservation under composition is often difficult to show. Here, we present an original methodology to achieve this task, which requires to combine advanced tools from game semantics, rewriting theory and categorical algebra. We introduce a diagrammatic presentation of the monoidal category of definable strategies of our model, by the means of generators and relations: those strategies can be generated from a finite set of atomic strategies and the equality between strategies admits a finite axiomatization, this equational structure corresponding to a polarized variation of the notion of bialgebra. This work thus bridges algebra and denotational semantics in order to reveal the structure of dependencies induced by first-order quantifiers, and lays the foundations for a mechanized analysis of causality in programming languages

Functorial Semantics for Petri Nets under the Individual Token Philosophy

Although the algebraic semantics of place/transition Petri nets under the collective token philosophy has been fully explained in terms of (strictly) symmetric (strict) monoidal categories, the analogous construction under the individual token philosophy is not completely satisfactory because it lacks universality and also functoriality. We introduce the notion of pre-net to recover these aspects, obtaining a fully satisfactory categorical treatment centered on the notion of adjunction. This allows us to present a purely logical description of net behaviours under the individual token philosophy in terms of theories and theory morphisms in partial membership equational logic, yielding a complete match with the theory developed by the authors for the collective token view of net

Two Algebraic Process Semantics for Contextual Nets

We show that the so-called 'Petri nets are monoids' approach initiated by Meseguer and Montanari can be extended from ordinary place/transition Petri nets to contextual nets by considering suitable non-free monoids of places. The algebraic characterizations of net concurrent computations we provide cover both the collective and the individual token philosophy, uniformly along the two interpretations, and coincide with the classical proposals for place/transition Petri nets in the absence of read-arcs

Presenting Finite Posets

We introduce a monoidal category whose morphisms are finite partial orders, with chosen minimal and maximal elements as source and target respectively. After recalling the notion of presentation of a monoidal category by the means of generators and relations, we construct a presentation of our category, which corresponds to a variant of the notion of bialgebra.Comment: In Proceedings TERMGRAPH 2014, arXiv:1505.0681

Open Graphs and Monoidal Theories

String diagrams are a powerful tool for reasoning about physical processes, logic circuits, tensor networks, and many other compositional structures. The distinguishing feature of these diagrams is that edges need not be connected to vertices at both ends, and these unconnected ends can be interpreted as the inputs and outputs of a diagram. In this paper, we give a concrete construction for string diagrams using a special kind of typed graph called an open-graph. While the category of open-graphs is not itself adhesive, we introduce the notion of a selective adhesive functor, and show that such a functor embeds the category of open-graphs into the ambient adhesive category of typed graphs. Using this functor, the category of open-graphs inherits "enough adhesivity" from the category of typed graphs to perform double-pushout (DPO) graph rewriting. A salient feature of our theory is that it ensures rewrite systems are "type-safe" in the sense that rewriting respects the inputs and outputs. This formalism lets us safely encode the interesting structure of a computational model, such as evaluation dynamics, with succinct, explicit rewrite rules, while the graphical representation absorbs many of the tedious details. Although topological formalisms exist for string diagrams, our construction is discreet, finitary, and enjoys decidable algorithms for composition and rewriting. We also show how open-graphs can be parametrised by graphical signatures, similar to the monoidal signatures of Joyal and Street, which define types for vertices in the diagrammatic language and constraints on how they can be connected. Using typed open-graphs, we can construct free symmetric monoidal categories, PROPs, and more general monoidal theories. Thus open-graphs give us a handle for mechanised reasoning in monoidal categories.Comment: 31 pages, currently technical report, submitted to MSCS, waiting review

Coherence in monoidal track categories

We introduce homotopical methods based on rewriting on higher-dimensional categories to prove coherence results in categories with an algebraic structure. We express the coherence problem for (symmetric) monoidal categories as an asphericity problem for a track category and we use rewriting methods on polygraphs to solve it. The setting is extended to more general coherence problems, seen as 3-dimensional word problems in a track category, including the case of braided monoidal categories.Comment: 32 page

A Diagrammatic Axiomatisation for Qubit Entanglement

Diagrammatic techniques for reasoning about monoidal categories provide an intuitive understanding of the symmetries and connections of interacting computational processes. In the context of categorical quantum mechanics, Coecke and Kissinger suggested that two 3-qubit states, GHZ and W, may be used as the building blocks of a new graphical calculus, aimed at a diagrammatic classification of multipartite qubit entanglement that would highlight the communicational properties of quantum states, and their potential uses in cryptographic schemes. In this paper, we present a full graphical axiomatisation of the relations between GHZ and W: the ZW calculus. This refines a version of the preexisting ZX calculus, while keeping its most desirable characteristics: undirectedness, a large degree of symmetry, and an algebraic underpinning. We prove that the ZW calculus is complete for the category of free abelian groups on a power of two generators - "qubits with integer coefficients" - and provide an explicit normalisation procedure.Comment: 12 page