Full Abstraction for Set-Based Models of the Symmetric Interaction Combinators

The symmetric interaction combinators are a model of distributed and deterministic computation based on Lafont’s interaction nets, a special form of graph rewriting. The interest of the symmetric interaction combinators lies in their universality, that is, the fact that they may encode all other interaction net systems; for instance, several implementations of the lambda-calculus in the symmetric interaction combinators exist, related to Lamping’s sharing graphs for optimal reduction. A certain number of observational equivalences were introduced for this system, by Lafont, Fernandez and Mackie, and the first author. In this paper, we study the problem of full abstraction with respect to one of these equivalences, using a class of very simple denotational models based on pointed sets.