15 research outputs found

    Change Actions: Models of Generalised Differentiation

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    Cai et al. have recently proposed change structures as a semantic framework for incremental computation. We generalise change structures to arbitrary cartesian categories and propose the notion of change action model as a categorical model for (higher-order) generalised differentiation. Change action models naturally arise from many geometric and computational settings, such as (generalised) cartesian differential categories, group models of discrete calculus, and Kleene algebra of regular expressions. We show how to build canonical change action models on arbitrary cartesian categories, reminiscent of the F\`aa di Bruno construction

    Fixed-point elimination in the intuitionistic propositional calculus

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    It is a consequence of existing literature that least and greatest fixed-points of monotone polynomials on Heyting algebras-that is, the algebraic models of the Intuitionistic Propositional Calculus-always exist, even when these algebras are not complete as lattices. The reason is that these extremal fixed-points are definable by formulas of the IPC. Consequently, the μ\mu-calculus based on intuitionistic logic is trivial, every μ\mu-formula being equivalent to a fixed-point free formula. We give in this paper an axiomatization of least and greatest fixed-points of formulas, and an algorithm to compute a fixed-point free formula equivalent to a given μ\mu-formula. The axiomatization of the greatest fixed-point is simple. The axiomatization of the least fixed-point is more complex, in particular every monotone formula converges to its least fixed-point by Kleene's iteration in a finite number of steps, but there is no uniform upper bound on the number of iterations. We extract, out of the algorithm, upper bounds for such n, depending on the size of the formula. For some formulas, we show that these upper bounds are polynomial and optimal

    SProc Categorically

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    . We provide a systematic reconstruction of Abramsky's category SProc of synchronous processes [Abr93]: SProc is isomorphic to a span category on a category of traces. The significance of the work is twofold: It shows that the original presentation of SProc in mixed formulations is unnecessary --- a simple categorical description exists. Furthermore, the techniques employed in the reconstruction suggest a general method of obtaining process categories with structure similar to SProc. In particular, the method of obtaining bisimulation equivalence in our setting, which represents an extension of the work of Joyal, Nielsen and Winskel [JNW93], has natural application in many settings. 1 Introduction In [Abr93], Abramsky proposed a new paradigm for the semantics of computation, interaction categories, where the following substitutions are made: Denotational semantics Categories Interaction categories Domains objects Interface specifications Continuous functions maps Commun..

    Change actions: models of generalised differentiation

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    Change structures, introduced by Cai et al., have recently been proposed as a semantic framework for incremental computation. We generalise change actions, an alternative to change structures, to arbitrary cartesian categories and propose the notion of change action model as a categorical model for (higher-order) generalised differentiation. Change action models naturally arise from many geometric and computational settings, such as (generalised) cartesian differential categories, group models of discrete calculus, and Kleene algebra of regular expressions. We show how to build canonical change action models on arbitrary cartesian categories, reminiscent of the Fàa di Bruno construction

    Fixing incremental computation: derivatives of fixpoints, and the recursive semantics of datalog

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    Incremental computation has recently been studied using the concepts of change structures and derivatives of programs, where the derivative of a function allows updating the output of the function based on a change to its input. We generalise change structures to change actions, and study their algebraic properties. We develop change actions for common structures in computer science, including directed-complete partial orders and Boolean algebras. We then show how to compute derivatives of fixpoints. This allows us to perform incremental evaluation and maintenance of recursively defined functions with particular application generalised Datalog programs. Moreover, unlike previous results, our techniques are modular in that they are easy to apply both to variants of Datalog and to other programming languages
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