Explicit Computational Paths

The treatment of equality as a type in type theory gives rise to an interesting type-theoretic structure known as `identity type'. The idea is that, given terms $a,b$ of a type $A$, one may form the type $Id_{A}(a,b)$, whose elements are proofs that $a$ and $b$ are equal elements of type $A$. A term of this type, $p : Id_{A}(a,b)$, makes up for the grounds (or proof) that establishes that $a$ is indeed equal to $b$. Based on that, a proof of equality can be seen as a sequence of substitutions and rewrites, also known as a `computational path'. One interesting fact is that it is possible to rewrite computational paths using a set of reduction rules arising from an analysis of redundancies in paths. These rules were mapped by De Oliveira in 1994 in a term rewrite system known as $LND_{EQ}-TRS$. Here we use computational paths and this term rewrite system to develop the main foundations of homotopy type theory, i.e., we develop the lemmas and theorems connected to the main types of this theory, types such as products, coproducts, identity type, transport and many others. We also show that it is possible to directly construct path spaces through computational paths. To show this, we construct the natural numbers and the fundamental group of the circle, showing results connected to these structures.