Abstract
We present a calculus of “circular proofs”: the graph underlying a proof is not a finite tree but instead it is allowed to contain a certain amount of cycles.The main challenge in developing a theory for the calculus is to define the semantics of proofs, since the usual method by induction on the structure is not available. We solve this problem by associating to each proof a system of equations - defining relations among undetermined arrows of an arbitrary category with finite products and coproducts as well as constructible initial algebras and final coalgebras - and by proving that this system admits always a unique solution.
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Work developed at BRICS, Centre of the Danish National Research Foundation.
Supported by Canada’s NSERC and the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences.
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Santocanale, L. (2002). A Calculus of Circular Proofs and Its Categorical Semantics. In: Nielsen, M., Engberg, U. (eds) Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structures. FoSSaCS 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2303. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45931-6_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45931-6_25
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