Divergence and non-determinism play a fundamental role in the theory of computation, and their combined effect on computational equality deserves further study. By looking at the issue from the point of view of both computation and interaction, we are led to a canonical equality for non-deterministic computation, revealing its rich algebraic structure. We study this structure in three ways. First, we construct a complete equational system for finite-state non-deterministic computation. The challenge with such a system is to find an equational alternative to fixpoint induction à la Milner. We establish a negative result in the form of the non-existence of a finite equational system for the canonical equality of non-deterministic computation to support our approach. We then investigate infinite-state non-deterministic computation in the light of definability and show that every recursively enumerable set is generated by an unobservable process. Finally, we prove that, as far as computation is concerned, the effect produced jointly by divergence and non-determinism is model independent for a large class of process models.

We use C-graphs, which are interesting in their own right, as abstract representations of the computational objects throughout the paper.

We propose a refinement and a simplification of the behavioural semantics of session types, based on the concepts of compliance and sub-behaviour from the theory of web contracts. We introduce three relations on a suitable class of behaviours with higher-order input/output, called ‘session behaviours’. Such relations, depending on each other, represent the idea of sub-behaviour from the point of view of a client, a server or a peer, respectively. A restriction of the intersection of the first two relations characterizes the ‘usual’ sub-behaviour relation from the literature. We then device an algorithmic formal system for three subtyping relations (dubbed CSP-subtyping) for session types that takes into account the role played by a user of a channel during an interaction, so extending Gay and Hole subtyping theory. We show that our session behaviours and sub-behaviour relations provide sound and complete semantics for CSP-subtyping, and for Gay and Hole subtyping as a by-product.

Recently, in order to mix algebraic and logic styles of specification in a uniform framework, the notion of a logic labelled transition system (Logic LTS or LLTS for short) has been introduced and explored. A variety of constructors over LLTS, including usual process-algebraic operators, logic connectives (conjunction and disjunction) and standard temporal modalities (always and unless), have been given. However, no attempt has been made so far to develop the general theory concerning (nested) recursive operations over LLTS and a few fundamental problems are still open. This paper intends to study this issue in a pure process-algebraic style. A few fundamental properties, including precongruence and the uniqueness of consistent solutions of equations, will be established.

Motivated by questions in theoretical distributed computing, we develop the combinatorial theory of abstract simplex path subdivisions. Our main application is a short and structural proof of a theorem of Castañeda and Rajsbaum. This theorem in turn implies the solvability of the weak symmetry breaking task in the immediate snapshot wait-free model in the case when the number of processes is not a power of a prime number.