From Thin Concurrent Games to Generalized Species of Structures

Two families of denotational models have emerged from the semantic analysis of linear logic: dynamic models, typically presented as game semantics, and static models, typically based on a category of relations. In this paper we introduce a formal bridge between two-dimensional dynamic and static models: we connect the bicategory of thin concurrent games and strategies, based on event structures, to the bicategory of generalized species of structures, based on distributors.

In the first part of the paper, we construct an oplax functor from (the linear bicategory of) thin concurrent games to distributors. This explains how to view a strategy as a distributor, and highlights two fundamental differences: the composition mechanism, and the representation of resource symmetries.

In the second part of the paper, we adapt established methods from game semantics (visible strategies, payoff structure) to enforce a tighter connection between the two models. We obtain a cartesian closed pseudofunctor, which we exploit to shed new light on recent results in the bicategorical theory of the λ-calculus.