The word problem for categories with free products and coproducts (sums), SP-categories, is directly related to the problem of determining the equivalence of certain processes. Indeed, the maps in these categories may be directly interpreted as proce
sses which communicate by two-way channels. The maps of an SP-category may also be viewed as a proof theory for a simple logic with a game theoretic intepretation. The cut-elimination procedure for this logic determines equality only up to certain permuting
This paper exhibits a general and uniform method to prove completeness for certain modal fixpoint logics. Given a set Gamma of modal formulas of the form gamma(x, p1, . . ., pn), where x occurs only positively in gamma, the language Lsharp (Gamma) is
obtained by adding to the language of polymodal logic a connective sharp_gamma for each gamma epsilon. The term sharp_gamma (varphi1, . . ., varphin) is meant to be interpreted as the least fixed point of the functional interpretation of the term gamma(x, varphi 1, . . ., varphi n). We consider the following problem: given Gamma, construct an axiom system which is sound and complete with respect to the concrete interpretation of the language Lsharp (Gamma) on Kripke frames. We prove two results that solve this problem. First, let Ksharp (Gamma) be the logic obtained from the basic polymodal K by adding a Kozen-Park style fixpoint axiom and a least fixpoint rule, for each fixpoint connective sharp_gamma. Provided that each indexing formula gamma satisfies the syntactic criterion of being untied in x, we prove this axiom system to be complete. Second, addressing the general case, we prove the soundness and completeness of an extension K+ (Gamma) of K_sharp (Gamma). This extension is obtained via an effective procedure that, given an indexing formula gamma as input, returns a finite set of axioms and derivation rules for sharp_gamma, of size bounded by the length of gamma. Thus the axiom system K+ (Gamma) is finite whenever Gamma is finite.
