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

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

Coherent Presentations of Monoidal Categories

Presentations of categories are a well-known algebraic tool to provide descriptions of categories by means of generators, for objects and morphisms, and relations on morphisms. We generalize here this notion, in order to consider situations where the objects are considered modulo an equivalence relation, which is described by equational generators. When those form a convergent (abstract) rewriting system on objects, there are three very natural constructions that can be used to define the category which is described by the presentation: one consists in turning equational generators into identities (i.e. considering a quotient category), one consists in formally adding inverses to equational generators (i.e. localizing the category), and one consists in restricting to objects which are normal forms. We show that, under suitable coherence conditions on the presentation, the three constructions coincide, thus generalizing celebrated results on presentations of groups, and we extend those conditions to presentations of monoidal categories

Presentation of a Game Semantics for First-Order Propositional Logic

Game semantics aim at describing the interactive behaviour of proofs by interpreting formulas as games on which proofs induce strategies. In this article, we introduce a game semantics for a fragment of first order propositional logic. One of the main difficulties that has to be faced when constructing such semantics is to make them precise by characterizing definable strategies - that is strategies which actually behave like a proof. This characterization is usually done by restricting to the model to strategies satisfying subtle combinatory conditions such as innocence, whose preservation under composition is often difficult to show. Here, we present an original methodology to achieve this task which requires to combine tools from game semantics, rewriting theory and categorical algebra. We introduce a diagrammatic presentation of definable strategies by the means of generators and relations: those strategies can be generated from a finite set of ``atomic'' strategies and that the equality between strategies generated in such a way admits a finite axiomatization. These generators satisfy laws which are a variation of bialgebras laws, thus bridging algebra and denotational semantics in a clean and unexpected way

Brief Announcement: On the Impossibility of Detecting Concurrency

We identify a general principle of distributed computing: one cannot force two processes running in parallel to see each other. This principle is formally stated in the context of asynchronous processes communicating through shared objects, using trace-based semantics. We prove that it holds in a reasonable computational model, and then study the class of concurrent specifications which satisfy this property. This allows us to derive a Galois connection theorem for different variants of linearizability

Computing Critical Pairs in 2-Dimensional Rewriting Systems

International audienceRewriting systems on words are very useful in the study of monoids. In good cases, they give finite presentations of the monoids, allowing their manipulation by a computer. Even better, when the presentation is confluent and terminating, they provide one with a notion of canonical representative for 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. Here, we are interested in proving confluence for polygraphs presenting 2-categories, which can be seen as a generalization of term rewriting systems. For this purpose, we propose an adaptation of the usual algorithm for computing critical pairs. Interestingly, this framework is much richer than term rewriting systems and requires the elaboration of a new theoretical framework for representing critical pairs, based on contexts in compact 2-categories

Concurrent Specifications Beyond Linearizability

With the advent of parallel architectures, distributed programs are used intensively and the question of how to formally specify the behaviors expected from such programs becomes crucial. A very general way to specify concurrent objects is to simply give the set of all the execution traces that we consider correct for the object. In many cases, one is only interested in studying a subclass of these concurrent specifications, and more convenient tools such as linearizability can be used to describe them. In this paper, what we call a concurrent specification will be a set of execution traces that moreover satisfies a number of axioms. As we argue, these are actually the only concurrent specifications of interest: we prove that, in a reasonable computational model, every program satisfies all of our axioms. Restricting to this class of concurrent specifications allows us to formally relate our concurrent specifications with the ones obtained by linearizability, as well as its more recent variants (set- and interval-linearizability)

Categorical Coherence from Term Rewriting Systems

International audienceThe celebrated Squier theorem allows to prove coherence properties of algebraic structures, such as MacLane’s coherence theorem for monoidal categories, based on rewriting techniques. We are interested here in extending the theory and associated tools simultaneously in two directions. Firstly, we want to take in account situations where coherence is partial, in the sense that it only applies for a subset of structural morphisms (for instance, in the case of the coherence theorem for symmetric monoidal categories, we do not want to strictify the symmetry). Secondly, we are interested in structures where variables can be duplicated or erased. We develop theorems and rewriting techniques in order to achieve this, first in the setting of abstract rewriting systems, and then extend them to term rewriting systems, suitably generalized in order to take coherence in account. As an illustration of our results, we explain how to recover the coherence theorems for monoidal and symmetric monoidal categories

Presenting a Category Modulo a Rewriting System

Presentations of categories are a well-known algebraic tool to provide descriptions of categories by the means of generators, for objects and morphisms, and relations on morphisms. We generalize here this notion, in order to consider situations where the objects are considered modulo an equivalence relation (in the spirit of rewriting modulo), which is described by equational generators. When those form a convergent (abstract) rewriting system on objects, there are three very natural constructions that can be used to define the category which is described by the presentation: one is based on restricting to objects which are normal forms, one consists in turning equational generators into identities (i.e. considering a quotient category), and one consists in formally adding inverses to equational generators (i.e. localizing the category). We show that, under suitable coherence conditions on the presentation, the three constructions coincide, thus generalizing celebrated results on presentations of groups. We illustrate our techniques on a non-trivial example, and hint at a generalization for 2-categories