Strategies as Resource Terms, and their Categorical Semantics

TL;DR

This paper refines the connection between resource calculus terms and game semantics by introducing causal structures called augmentations, providing a direct model that is invariant under reduction.

Contribution

It introduces augmentations for a direct semantic correspondence and develops a resource category model invariant under resource term reduction.

Findings

Established a direct link between resource terms and Hyland-Ong plays using augmentations.

Developed a denotational model of resource calculus invariant under reduction.

Created a categorical framework called resource category analogous to differential categories.

Abstract

As shown by Tsukada and Ong, simply-typed, normal and eta-long resource terms correspond to plays in Hyland-Ong games, quotiented by Melli\`es' homotopy equivalence. The original proof of this inspiring result is indirect, relying on the injectivity of the relational model w.r.t. both sides of the correspondence -- in particular, the dynamics of the resource calculus is taken into account only via the compatibility of the relational model with the composition of normal terms defined by normalization. In the present paper, we revisit and extend these results. Our first contribution is to restate the correspondence by considering causal structures we call augmentations, which are canonical representatives of Hyland-Ong plays up to homotopy. This allows us to give a direct and explicit account of the connection with normal resource terms. As a second contribution, we extend this account to the reduction of resource terms: building on a notion of strategies as weighted sums of augmentations, we provide a denotational model of the resource calculus, invariant under reduction. A key step -- and our third contribution -- is a categorical model we call a resource category, which is to the resource calculus what differential categories are to the differential lambda-calculus.