Non-angelic Concurrent Game Semantics

2002

Game Semantics has emerged as a powerful paradigm for giving semantics to a variety of programming languages and logical systems. It has been used to construct the first syntax-independent fully abstract models for a spectrum of programming languages ranging from purely functional languages to languages with non-functional features such as control operators and locally-scoped references [4, 21, 5, 19, 2, 22, 17, 11].

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007

Game 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 [11], 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 [11].

In this paper we present a fully abstract game model for the pure lazy λ-calculus, i.e. the lazy λ-calculus without constants. In order to obtain this result we introduce a new category of games, the monotonic games, whose main characteristic consists in having an order relation on moves.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007

The notion of innocent strategy was introduced by Hyland and Ong in order to capture the interactive behaviour of λ-terms and PCF programs. An innocent strategy is defined as an alternating strategy with partial memory, in which the strategy plays according to its view. Extending the definition to nonalternating strategies is problematic, because the traditional definition of views is based on the hypothesis that Opponent and Proponent alternate during the interaction. Here, we take advantage of the diagrammatic reformulation of alternating innocence in asynchronous games, in order to provide a tentative definition of innocence in non-alternating games. The task is interesting, and far from easy. It requires the combination of true concurrency and game semantics in a clean and organic way, clarifying the relationship between asynchronous games and concurrent games in the sense of Abramsky and Melliès. It also requires an interactive reformulation of the usual acyclicity criterion of linear logic, as well as a directed variant, as a scheduling criterion.

1999

The aim of this chapter is to give an introduction to some recent work on the application of game semantics to the study of programming languages. An initial success for game semantics was its use in giving the first syntax-free descriptions of the fully abstract model for the functional programming language PCF [1,16,29]. One goal of semantics is to characterize the "universe of discourse" implicit in a programming language or a logic.

2001

Theoretical Computer Science, 1994

The weakest-precondition interpretation of recursive procedures is developed for a language with a combination of unbounded demonic choice and unbounded angelic choice. This compositional formal semantics is proved to be equal to a game-theoretic operational semantics. Two intermediate stages are exploited. One step consists of unfolding the declaration of the recursive procedures. Fixpoint induction is used to prove the validity of this step. The compositional semantics of the unfolded declaration is proved to be equal to a formal semantics of a stack implementation of the recursive procedures. After an introduction to boolean two-person games, this stack semantics is shown to correspond to a game-theoretic operational semantics.

1999

Abstract. We study extensional models of the untyped lambda calculus in the setting of the game semantics introduced by Abramsky, Hyland et alii. In particular we show that, somewhat unexpectedly and contrary to what happens in ordinary categories of domains, all reflexive objects in a standard category of games, induce the same λ-theory. This is H∗, the maximal theory induced already by the classical C.P.O. model D∞, introduced by Scott in 1969. This results indicates that the current notion of game carries a very specific bias towards head reduction.

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. † This work has been supported by the ANR Invariants algébriques des systèmes informatiques (INVAL). Physical address:Équipe PPS, CNRS and Université Paris 7, 2 place Jussieu, case 7017,

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1999

We study extensional models of the untyped lambda calculus in the setting of the game semantics introduced by Abramsky, Hyland et alii. In particular we show that, somewhat unexpectedly and contrary to what happens in ordinary categories of domains, all reflexive objects in a standard category of games, induce the same λ-theory. This is H * , the maximal theory induced already by the classical C.P.O. model D∞, introduced by Scott in 1969. This results indicates that the current notion of game carries a very specific bias towards head reduction.

DAIMI Report Series, 1994

In a recent paper by Joyal, Nielsen, and Winskel, bisimulation is defined in an abstract and uniform way across a wide range of different models for concurrency. In this paper, following a recent trend in theoretical computer science, we characterize their abstract definition game-theoretically and logically in a non-interleaving model. Our characterizations appear as surprisingly simple extensions of corresponding characterizations of interleaving bisimulation.

2012 27th Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, 2012

A bicategory of concurrent games, where nondeterministic strategies are formalized as certain maps of event structures, was introduced recently. This paper studies an extension of concurrent games by winning conditions, specifying players' objectives. The introduction of winning conditions raises the question of whether such games are determined, that is, if one of the players has a winning strategy. This paper gives a positive answer to this question when the games are well-founded and satisfy a structural property, race-freedom, which prevents one player from interfering with the moves available to the other. Uncovering the conditions under which concurrent games with winning conditions are determined opens up the possibility of further applications of concurrent games in areas such as logic and verification, where both winning conditions and determinacy are most needed. A concurrent-game semantics for predicate calculus is provided as an illustration.

Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, 2009

We study the algebraic structure of a programming language with higher-order store, in the style of ML references. Instead of working directly on the operational semantics of the language, we consider its fully abstract game semantics defined by Abramsky, Honda and McCusker one decade ago. This alternative description of the language is nice and conceptual, except on one significant point: the interactive behavior of the higher-order memory cell is reflected in the model by a strategy cell whose definition remains slightly enigmatic. The purpose of our work is precisely to clarify this point, by providing a neat algebraic definition of the strategy. This conceptual reconstruction of the memory cell is based on the idea that a general reference behaves essentially as a linear feedback (or trace operator) in an ambient category of Conway games and strategies. This analysis leads to a purely axiomatic proof of soundness of the model, based on a natural refinement of the replication modality of tensor logic.

Log. Methods Comput. Sci., 2017

Weak bisimulations are typically used in process algebras where silent steps are used to abstract from internal behaviours. They facilitate relating implementations to specifications. When an implementation fails to conform to its specification, pinpointing the root cause can be challenging. In this paper we provide a generic characterisation of branching-, delayed-, $\eta$- and weak-bisimulation as a game between Spoiler and Duplicator, offering an operational understanding of the relations. We show how such games can be used to assist in diagnosing non-conformance between implementation and specification. Moreover, we show how these games can be extended to distinguish divergences.

Synthese, 2008

We make a proposal for formalizing simultaneous games at the abstraction level of player's powers, combining ideas from dynamic logic of sequential games and concurrent dynamic logic. We prove completeness for a new system of 'concurrent game logic' CDGL with respect to finite non-determined games. We also show how this system raises new mathematical issues, and throws light on branching quantifiers and independence-friendly evaluation games for first-order logic.