The phenomena of branching time and true or noninterleaving concurrency find their respective homes in automata and schedules. But these two models of computation are formally equivalent via Birkhoff duality, an equivalence we expound on here in tutorial detail. So why should these phenomena prefer one home over the other? We identify dimension as the culprit: 1dimensional automata are skeletons permitting only interleaving concurrency, whereas true n-fold concurrency resides in transitions of dimension n. The truly concurrent automaton dual to a schedule is not a skeletal distributive lattice but a solid one. We introduce true nondeterminism and define it as monoidal homotopy; from this perspective nondeterminism in ordinary automata arises from forking and joining creating nontrivial homotopy. The automaton dual to a poset schedule is simply connected whereas that dual to an event structure schedule need not be, according to monoidal homotopy though not to group homotopy. We conclude...

In Floyd-Hoare logic, programs are dynamic while assertions are static (hold at states). In action logic the two notions become one, with programs viewed as on-the-fly assertions whose truth is evaluated along intervals instead of at states. Action logic is an equational theory ACT conservatively extending the equational theory REG of regular expressions with operations preimplication a!b (had a then b) and postimplication b/a (b if-ever a). Unlike REG, ACT is finitely based, makes a reflexive transitive closure, and has an equivalent Hilbert system. The crucial axiom is that of pure induction, (a!a) = a!a. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number CCR-8814921. 1 Introduction Many logics of action have been proposed, most of them in the past two decades. Here we define action logic, ACT, a new yet simple juxtaposition of old ideas, and show off some of its attractive aspects. The language of action logic is that of equational regular expressio...

The varieties RA of relation algebras and DA of dynamic algebras are similar with regard to definitional capacity, admitting essentially the same equational definitions of converse and star. They differ with regard to completeness and decidability. The RA definitions that are incomplete with respect to representable relation algebras, when expressed in their DA form are complete with respect to representable dynamic algebras. Moreover, whereas the theory of RA is undecidable, that of DA is decidable in exponential time. These results follow from representability of the free intensional dynamic algebras. Dept. of Computer Science, Stanford, CA 94305. This paper is based on a talk given at the conference Algebra and Computer Science, Ames, Iowa, June 2-4, 1988. It will appear in the proceedings of that conference, to be published by SpringerVerlag in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number CCR-8814921 ...

We represent concurrent processes as Boolean propositions or gates, cast in the role of acceptors of concurrent behavior. This properly extends other mainstream representations of concurrent behavior such as event structures, yet is defined more simply. It admits an intrinsic notion of duality that permits processes to be viewed as either schedules or automata. Its algebraic structure is essentially that of linear logic, with its morphisms being consequence-preserving renamings of propositions, and with its operations forming the core of a natural concurrent programming language. 1

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Boolean logic treats disjunction and conjunction symmetrically and algebraically. The corresponding operations for computation are respectively nondeterminism (choice) and concurrency. Petri nets treat these symmetrically but not algebraically, while event structures treat them algebraically but not symmetrically. Here we achieve both via the notion of an event space as a poset with all nonempty joins representing concurrence and a top representing the unreachable event. The symmetry is with the dual notion of state space, a poset with all nonempty meets representing choice and a bottom representing the start state. The algebra is that of a parallel programming language expanded to the language of full linear logic, Girard's axiomatization of which is satisfied by the event space interpretation of this language. Event spaces resemble finite dimensional vector spaces in distinguishing tensor product from direct product and in being isomorphic to their double dual, but differ from them i...

A Chu space is a binary relation = | from a set A to an antiset X defined as a set which transforms via converse functions. Chu spaces admit a great many interpretations by virtue of realizing all small concrete categories and most large ones arising in mathematical and computational practice. Of particular interest for computer science is their interpretation as computational processes, which takes A to be a schedule of events distributed in time, X to be an automaton of states forming an information system in the sense of Scott, and the pairs (a, x) in the = | relation to be the individual transcriptions of the making of history. The traditional homogeneous binary relations of transition on X and precedence on A are recovered as respectively the right and left residuals of the heterogeneous binary relation = | with itself. The natural algebra of Chu spaces is that of linear logic, made a process algebra by the process interpretation. 1

The states of a computing system bear information and change time, while its events bear time and change information. We develop a primitive algebraic model of this duality of time and information for rigid local computation, or straightline code, in the absence of choice and concurrency, where time and information are linearly ordered. This shows the duality of computation to be more fundamental than the logic of computation for which choice is disjunction and concurrency conjunction. To accommodate flexible distributed computing systems we then bring in choice and concurrency and pass to partially ordered time and information, the formal basis for this extension being Birkhoff-Stone duality. A degree of freedom in how this is done permits a perfectly symmetric logic of computation amounting to Girard's full linear logic, which we view as the natural logic of computation when equal importance is attached to choice and concurrency. We conclude with an assessment of the prospects for ex...

Quantum logic is static, describing automata having uncertain states but no state transitions and no Heisenberg uncertainty tradeoff. We cast Girard’s linear logic in the role of a dynamic quantum logic, regarded as an extension of quantum logic with time nonstandardly interpreted over a domain of linear automata and their dual linear schedules. In this extension the uncertainty tradeoff emerges via the “structure veil. ” When VLSI shrinks to where quantum effects are felt, their computer-aided design systems may benefit from such logics of computational behavior having a strong connection to quantum mechanics. 1

Dynamic algebras combine the classes of Boolean (B 0 0) and regular (R [ ; ) algebras into a single finitely axiomatized variety (B R 3) resembling an R-module with "scalar" multiplication 3. The basic result is that is reflexive transitive closure, contrary to the intuition that this concept should require quantifiers for its definition. Using this result we give several examples of dynamic algebras arising naturally in connection with additive functions, binary relations, state trajectories, languages, and flowcharts. The main result is that free dynamic algebras are residually finite (i.e. factor as a subdirect product of finite dynamic algebras), important because finite separable dynamic algebras are isomorphic to Kripke structures. Applications include a new completeness proof for the Segerberg axiomatization of propositional dynamic logic, and yet another notion of regular algebra. Key words: Dynamic algebra, logic, program verification, regular algebra. This paper or...