Computer science and computer engineering are disciplines that have very definitely permeated and transformed every aspect of modern society. In these fields, cutting-edge research is about new models of computation, new materials and techniques for building computer hardware and novel methods for speeding-up algorithms. But it is also about building bridges between computer science and various other scientific fields, bridges that allow scientists to both think of natural phenomena as computational procedures and to employ novel models of computation to simulate natural processes (for example, quantum walks have been used to model energy transport in photosynthetic light harvesting complexes (Hoyer et al. 2010; Caruso et al. 2010)). A convergence of scientific, technological, economic and epistemological demands is driving and integrating this research.

We study the functorial characterisation of bisimulation-based equivalences over a categorical model of labelled trees. We show that in a setting where all labels are visible, strong bisimilarity can be characterised in terms of enriched functors by relying on the reflection of paths with their factorisations. For an enriched functor F, this notion requires that a path (an internal morphism in our framework) π going from F(A) to C corresponds to a path p going from A to K, with F(K) = C, such that every possible factorisation of π can be lifted in an appropriate factorisation of p. This last property corresponds to a Conduché property for enriched functors, and a very rigid formulation of it has been used by Lawvere to characterise the determinacy of physical systems. We also consider the setting where some labels are not visible, and provide characterisations for weak and branching bisimilarity. Both equivalences are still characterised in terms of enriched functors that reflect paths with their factorisations: for branching bisimilarity, the property is the same as the one used to characterise strong bisimilarity when all labels are visible; for weak bisimilarity, a weaker form of path factorisation lifting is needed. This fact can be seen as evidence that strong and branching bisimilarity are strictly related and that, unlike weak bisimilarity, they preserve process determinacy in the sense of Milner.

The Theory and Applications of Models of Computation (TAMC) conference series is both international and interdisciplinary in character, bringing together researchers working in computer science, mathematics (especially logic) and the physical sciences. It is this, together with its predominantly computational and computability theoretic focus, that gives the series its special character.

This issue of Mathematical Structures in Computer Science contains three papers selected from the 15th International Workshop on Expressiveness in Concurrency (EXPRESS'08) held on 23 August 2008 in Toronto (Canada) as a satellite event of CONCUR'08.

This special issue of Mathematical Structures in Computer Science contains six papers from the Workshop on Domains IX held at the University of Sussex (Brighton), on 22–24 September 2008. This was the ninth event in the long tradition of Domains workshops, which started in Darmstadt in 1994. Since then, workshops have been organised in Braunschweig (1996), Munich (1997), Siegen (1998), Darmstadt again (1999, 2004), Birmingham (2002) and Novosibirsk (2007).

The goal of this paper is to prove coherence results with respect to relational graphs for monoidal endofunctors, that is, endofunctors of a monoidal category that preserve the monoidal structure up to a natural transformation that need not be an isomorphism. These results are proved first in the absence of symmetry in the monoidal structure, and then with this symmetry. In the later parts of the paper, the coherence results are extended to monoidal endofunctors in monoidal categories that have diagonal or codiagonal natural transformations, or where the monoidal structure is given by finite products or coproducts. Monoidal endofunctors are interesting because they stand behind monoidal monads and comonads, for which coherence will be proved in a sequel to this paper.

We introduce pairwise Stone spaces as a bitopological generalisation of Stone spaces – the duals of Boolean algebras – and show that they are exactly the bitopological duals of bounded distributive lattices. The category PStone of pairwise Stone spaces is isomorphic to the category Spec of spectral spaces and to the category Pries of Priestley spaces. In fact, the isomorphism of Spec and Pries is most naturally seen through PStone by first establishing that Pries is isomorphic to PStone, and then showing that PStone is isomorphic to Spec. We provide the bitopological and spectral descriptions of many algebraic concepts important in the study of distributive lattices. We also give new bitopological and spectral dualities for Heyting algebras, thereby providing two new alternatives to Esakia's duality.

Process algebraic techniques for distributed systems are increasingly being targeted at identifying abstractions that are adequate for both high-level programming and specification and security analysis and verification. Drawing on our earlier work in Bugliesi and Focardi, (2008), we investigate the expressive power of a core set of security and network abstractions that provide high-level primitives for specifying the honest principals in a network, while at the same time enabling an analysis of the network-level adversarial attacks that may be mounted by an intruder.

We analyse various bisimulation equivalences for security that arise from endowing the intruder with:

1. (i) different adversarial capabilities; and

2. (ii) increasingly powerful control over the interaction among the distributed principals of a network.

The spatial search problem consists of minimising the number of steps required to find a given site in a network under the restriction that only oracle queries or translations to neighbouring sites are allowed. We propose a quantum algorithm for the spatial search problem on a honeycomb lattice with N sites and torus-like boundary conditions. The search algorithm is based on a modified quantum walk on an hexagonal lattice and the general framework proposed by Ambainis, Kempe and Rivosh (Ambainis et al. 2005) is employed to show that the time complexity of this quantum search algorithm is .

The goal of this paper is to prove coherence results with respect to relational graphs for monoidal monads and comonads, that is, monads and comonads in a monoidal category such that the endofunctor of the monad or comonad is a monoidal functor (this means that it preserves the monoidal structure up to a natural transformation that need not be an isomorphism). These results are proved first in the absence of symmetry in the monoidal structure, and then with this symmetry. The monoidal structure is also allowed to be given with finite products or finite coproducts. Monoidal comonads with finite products axiomatise a plausible notion of equality of deductions in a fragment of the modal logic S4.

We present a method for constructing from a given domain representation of a space X with underlying domain D, a domain representation of a subspace of compact subsets of X where the underlying domain is the Plotkin powerdomain of D. We show that this operation is functorial over a category of domain representations with a natural choice of morphisms. We study the topological properties of the space of representable compact sets and isolate conditions under which all compact subsets of X are representable. Special attention is paid to admissible representations and representations of metric spaces.

We show that, for any abstract complexity measure in the sense of Blum and for any computable function f (or computable operator F), the class of problems that are f-speedable (or F-speedable) does not have effective measure 0. On the other hand, for sufficiently fast growing f (or F), the class of non-speedable computable problems does not have effective measure 0. These results answer some questions raised by Calude and Zimand. We also give a quantitative analysis of Borodin and Trakhtenbrot's Gap Theorem, which corrects a claim by Calude and Zimand.

In this paper we prove that any Turing machine that uses only a finite computational space for every input cannot solve an uncomputable problem even when it runs in accelerated mode. We also propose two ways to define the language accepted by an accelerated Turing machine. Accordingly, the classes of languages accepted by accelerated Turing machines are the closure under Boolean operations of the sets Σ1 and Σ2.

Bar recursion arises in constructive mathematics, logic, proof theory and higher-type computability theory. We explain bar recursion in terms of sequential games, and show how it can be naturally understood as a generalisation of the principle of backward induction that arises in game theory. In summary, bar recursion calculates optimal plays and optimal strategies, which, for particular games of interest, amount to equilibria. We consider finite games and continuous countably infinite games, and relate the two. The above development is followed by a conceptual explanation of how the finite version of the main form of bar recursion considered here arises from a strong monad of selections functions that can be defined in any cartesian closed category. Finite bar recursion turns out to be a well-known morphism available in any strong monad, specialised to the selection monad.

We explore the expressive power of languages that naturally model biochemical interactions relative to languages that only naturally model basic chemical reactions, identifying molecular association as the basic mechanism that distinguishes the former from the latter. We use a process algebra, the Biochemical Ground Form (BGF), that adds primitives for molecular association to CGF, which is a process algebra that has been proved to be equivalent to the traditional notations for describing basic chemical reactions. We first observe that, unlike CGF, BGF is Turing universal as it supports a finite precise encoding of Random Access Machines, which comprise a well-known Turing powerful formalism. Then we prove that the Turing universality of BGF derives from the interplay between the molecular primitives of association and dissociation. In fact, the elimination from BGF of the primitives already present in CGF does not reduce the computational strength of the process algebra, but if either association or dissociation is removed, BGF ceases to be Turing complete.

Setoids commonly take the place of sets when formalising mathematics inside type theory. In this note, the category of setoids is studied in type theory with universes that are as small as possible (and thus, the type theory is as weak as possible). In particular, we will consider epimorphisms and disjoint sums. We show that, given the minimal type universe, all epimorphisms are surjections, and disjoint sums exist. Further, without universes, there are countermodels for these statements, and if we use the Logical Framework formulation of type theory, these statements are provably non-derivable.

We introduce a strict version of the concept of a load/store instruction set architecture in the setting of Maurer machines. We take the view that transformations on the states of a Maurer machine are achieved by applying threads as considered in thread algebra to the Maurer machine. We study how the transformations on the states of the main memory of a strict load/store instruction set architecture that can be achieved by applying threads depend on the operating unit size, the cardinality of the instruction set and the maximal number of states of the threads.

We consider a functional language that performs non-deterministic tests on real numbers and define a denotational semantics for that language based on Smyth powerdomains. The semantics is only an approximate one because the denotation of a program for a real number may not be precise enough to tell which real number the program computes. However, for many first-order total functions f : n → , there exists a program for f whose denotation is precise enough to show that the program indeed computes the function f. In practice, it is not difficult to find programs like this that possess a faithful denotation. We provide a few examples of such programs and the corresponding proofs of correctness.

The work reported in this paper refers to Massey's proof of the surface classification theorem based on the standard word-rewriting treatment of surfaces. We arrange this approach into a formal rewriting system and provide a new version of Massey's argument. Moreover, we study the computational properties of two subsystems of : or for dealing with words denoting orientable surfaces and nor for dealing with words denoting non-orientable surfaces. We show how such properties induce an alternative proof for the surface classification in which the basic homeomorphism between the connected sum of three projective planes and the connected sum of a torus with a projective plane is not required.

Iterative monads were introduced by Calvin Elgot in the 1970's and are those ideal monads in which every guarded system of recursive equations has a unique solution. We prove that every ideal monad has an iterative reflection, that is, an embedding into an iterative monad with the expected universal property. We also introduce the concept of iterativity for algebras for the monad , following in the footsteps of Evelyn Nelson and Jerzy Tiuryn, and prove that is iterative if and only if all free algebras for are iterative algebras.