Toggling operators in computability logic

Abstract

Computability logic (CL) (see http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~giorgi/cl.html ) is a research program for redeveloping logic as a formal theory of computability, as opposed to the formal theory of truth which it has more traditionally been. Formulas in CL stand for interactive computational problems, seen as games between a machine and its environment; logical operators represent operations on such entities; and "truth" is understood as existence of an effective solution. The formalism of CL is open-ended, and may undergo series of extensions as the studies of the subject advance. So far three -- parallel, sequential and choice -- sorts of conjunction and disjunction have been studied. The present paper adds one more natural kind to this collection, termed toggling. The toggling operations can be characterized as lenient versions of choice operations where choices are retractable, being allowed to be reconsidered any finite number of times. This way, they model trial-and-error style decision steps in interactive computation. The main technical result of this paper is constructing a sound and complete axiomatization for the propositional fragment of computability logic whose vocabulary, together with negation, includes all four -- parallel, toggling, sequential and choice -- kinds of conjunction and disjunction. Along with toggling conjunction and disjunction, the paper also introduces the toggling versions of quantifiers and recurrence operations.