Symmetry in concurrent games

Abstract

Behavioural symmetry is introduced into concurrent games. It expresses when plays are essentially the same. A characterization of strategies on games with symmetry is provided. This leads to a bi-category of strategies on games with symmetry. Symmetry helps allay the perhaps overly-concrete nature of games and strategies, and shares many mathematical features with homotopy. In the presence of symmetry we can consider monads for which the monad laws do not hold on the nose but do hold up to symmetry. This broadening of the concept of monad has a dramatic effect on the types concurrent games can support and allows us, for example, to recover the replication needed to express and extend traditional game semantics.