Concurrent Hyland-Ong games

We build a cartesian closed category, called Cho, based on event structures. It allows an interpretation of higher-order stateful concurrent programs that is refined and precise: on the one hand it is conservative with respect to standard Hyland-Ong games when interpreting purely functional programs as innocent strategies, while on the other hand it is much more expressive. The interpretation of programs constructs compositionally a representation of their execution that exhibits causal dependencies and remembers the points of non-deterministic branching. The construction is in two stages. First, we build a compact closed category TCG. It is a variant of Rideau and Winskel’s category CG, with the difference that games and strategies in TCG are equipped with symmetry to express that certain events are essentially the same. This is analogous to the underlying category of AJM games enriching simple games with an equivalence relations on plays. Building on this category, we construct the cartesian closed category Cho as having as objects the standard arenas of Hyland-Ong games, with strategies, represented by certain events structures, playing on games with symmetry obtained as expanded forms of these arenas. To illustrate and give an operational light on these constructions, we interpret (a close variant of) Idealized Parallel Algol in Cho.