Transition systems over games

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• Paul Levy, University of Birmingham
• Thursday 30 April 2015, 16:00-17:00
• Mechanical Engineering, Room G28.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Mohammad Tayarani.

This talk combines two areas of computer science.

(1) The notions of labelled transition system (a set of states, starting from which an action may be performed, leading to another state), trace (a possible sequence of actions from a starting state) and bisimulation (a relation that guarantees two states have matching behaviour) have provided a useful way of reasoning about computational systems.

(2) Game semantics is a compositional way of describing the behaviour of higher-⁠order programs employing private state, providing a high-⁠level description in the sense that state is not mentioned.

We want to represent game semantics using transition systems, but traditional systems are too rigid because they have a fixed set of actions. So instead we develop a version of transition system in which each state sits over a position of our game. The actions are the currently available moves.

The compositional part of the story is given by a “transfer”, a kind of program that converts moves between two games, giving an operation on strategies. The agreement between the transition systems and the transfer is given by a relation called a “stepped bisimulation”.

(Joint work with Sam Staton)

This talk is part of the Computer Science Departmental Series series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Computer Science Departmental Series
• Computer Science Distinguished Seminars
• Mechanical Engineering, Room G28
• computer sience

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