Normalizing the Taylor expansion of non-deterministic {\lambda}-terms, via parallel reduction of resource vectors
Abstract
It has been known since Ehrhard and Regnier's seminal work on the Taylor expansion of -terms that this operation commutes with normalization: the expansion of a -term is always normalizable and its normal form is the expansion of the B\"ohm tree of the term. We generalize this result to the non-uniform setting of the algebraic -calculus, i.e. -calculus extended with linear combinations of terms. This requires us to tackle two difficulties: foremost is the fact that Ehrhard and Regnier's techniques rely heavily on the uniform, deterministic nature of the ordinary -calculus, and thus cannot be adapted; second is the absence of any satisfactory generic extension of the notion of B\"ohm tree in presence of quantitative non-determinism, which is reflected by the fact that the Taylor expansion of an algebraic -term is not always normalizable. Our solution is to provide a fine grained study of the dynamics of -reduction under Taylor expansion, by introducing a notion of reduction on resource vectors, i.e. infinite linear combinations of resource -terms. The latter form the multilinear fragment of the differential -calculus, and resource vectors are the target of the Taylor expansion of -terms. We show the reduction of resource vectors contains the image of any -reduction step, from which we deduce that Taylor expansion and normalization commute on the nose. We moreover identify a class of algebraic -terms, encompassing both normalizable algebraic -terms and arbitrary ordinary -terms: the expansion of these is always normalizable, which guides the definition of a generalization of B\"ohm trees to this setting.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1706.04700,
title = {Normalizing the Taylor expansion of non-deterministic {\lambda}-terms, via parallel reduction of resource vectors},
author = {Lionel Vaux},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.04700},
year = {2023}
}