Nicolai Kraus

Generalizations of Hedberg’s Theorem

As the groupoid interpretation by Hofmann and Streicher shows, uniqueness of identity proofs (UIP) is not provable. Generalizing a theorem by Hedberg, we give new characterizations of types that satisfy UIP. It turns out to be natural in this context to consider constant endofunctions. For such a function, we can look at the type of its fixed points. We show that this type has at most one element, which is a nontrivial lemma in the absence of UIP. As an application, a new notion of anonymous existence can be defined. One further main result is that, if every type has a constant endofunction, then all equalities are decidable. All the proofs have been formalized in Agda.

Constructions with Non-Recursive Higher Inductive Types

Higher inductive types (HITs) in homotopy type theory are a powerful generalization of inductive types. Not only can they have ordinary constructors to define elements, but also higher constructors to define equalities (paths). We say that a HIT H is non-recursive if its constructors do not quantify over elements or paths in H. The advantage of non-recursive HITs is that their elimination principles are easier to apply than those of general HITs.It is an open question which classes of HITs can be encoded as non-recursive HITs. One result of this paper is the construction of the propositional truncation via a sequence of approximations, yielding a representation as a non-recursive HIT. Compared to a related construction by van Doorn, ours has the advantage that the connectedness level increases in each step, yielding simplified elimination principles into n-types. As the elimination principle of our sequence has strictly lower requirements, we can then prove a similar result for van Doorn’s construction. We further derive general elimination principles of higher truncations (say, k-truncations) into n-types, generalizing a previous result by Capriotti et al. which considered the case n ≡ k + 1.

The General Universal Property of the Propositional Truncation.

In a type-theoretic fibration category in the sense of Shulman (representing a dependent type theory with at least 1, Sigma, Pi, and identity types), we define the type of constant functions from A to B. This involves an infinite tower of coherence conditions, and we therefore need the category to have Reedy limits of diagrams over omega. Our main result is that, if the category further has propositional truncations and satisfies function extensionality, the type of constant function is equivalent to the type ||A|| -> B. If B is an n-type for a given finite n, the tower of coherence conditions becomes finite and the requirement of nontrivial Reedy limits vanishes. The whole construction can then be carried out in Homotopy Type Theory and generalises the universal property of the truncation. This provides a way to define functions ||A|| -> B if B is not known to be propositional, and it streamlines the common approach of finding a proposition Q with A -> Q and Q -> B.

Quotient inductive-inductive types

The hiding operation, crucial in the compositional aspect of game semantics, removes computation paths not leading to observable results. Accordingly, games models are usually biased towards angelic non-determinism: diverging branches are forgotten. We present here new categories of games, not suffering from this bias. In our first category, we achieve this by avoiding hiding altogether; instead morphisms are uncovered strategies (with neutral events) up to weak bisimulation. Then, we show that by hiding only certain events dubbed inessential we can consider strategies up to isomorphism, and still get a category – this partial hiding remains sound up to weak bisimulation, so we get a concrete representations of programs (as in standard concurrent games) while avoiding the angelic bias. These techniques are illustrated with an interpretation of affine nondeterministic PCF which is adequate for weak bisimulation; and may, must and fair convergences.

Higher Homotopies in a Hierarchy of Univalent Universes

For Martin-Löf type theory with a hierarchy U0:U1:U2:… of univalent universes, we show that Un is not an n-type. Our construction also solves the problem of finding a type that strictly has some high truncation level without using higher inductive types. In particular, Un is such a type if we restrict it to n-types. We have fully formalized and verified our results within the dependently typed language and proof assistant Agda.

A Lambda Term Representation Inspired by Linear Ordered Logic

We introduce a new nameless representation of lambda terms inspired by ordered logic. At a lambda abstraction, number and relative position of all occurrences of the bound variable are stored, and application carries the additional information where to cut the variable context into function and argument part. This way, complete information about free variable occurrence is available at each subterm without requiring a traversal, and environments can be kept exact such that they only assign values to variables that actually occur in the associated term. Our approach avoids space leaks in interpreters that build function closures. In this article, we prove correctness of the new representation and present an experimental evaluation of its performance in a proof checker for the Edinburgh Logical Framework.

Free Higher Groups in Homotopy Type Theory

Given a type A in homotopy type theory (HoTT), we can define the free ∞-group on A as the loop space of the suspension of A + 1. Equivalently, this free higher group can be defined as a higher inductive type F(A) with constructors unit: F(A), cons: A~F(A)~F(A), and conditions saying that every cons(a) is an auto-equivalence on F(A). Assuming that A is a set (i.e. satisfies the principle of unique identity proofs), we are interested in the question whether F(A) is a set as well, which is very much related to an open problem in the HoTT book [22, Ex. 8.2]. We show an approximation to the question, namely that the fundamental groups of F(A) are trivial, i.e. that ||F(A)||1 is a set.