Asynchronous games 2: The true concurrency of innocence

AbstractIn game semantics, the higher-order value passing mechanisms of the λ-calculus are decomposed as sequences of atomic actions exchanged by a Player and its Opponent. Seen from this angle, game semantics is reminiscent of trace semantics in concurrency theory, where a process is identified to the sequences of requests it generates in the course of time. Asynchronous game semantics is an attempt to bridge the gap between the two subjects, and to see mainstream game semantics as a refined and interactive form of trace semantics. Asynchronous games are positional games played on Mazurkiewicz traces, which reformulate (and generalize) the familiar notion of arena game. The interleaving semantics of λ-terms, expressed as innocent strategies, may be analysed in this framework, in the perspective of true concurrency. The analysis reveals that innocent strategies are positional strategies regulated by forward and backward confluence properties. This captures, we believe, the essence of innocence. We conclude the article by defining a non-uniform variant of the λ-calculus, in which the game semantics of a λ-term is formulated directly as a trace semantics, performing the syntactic exploration or parsing of that λ-term