Re: [HoTT] Recovering an equivalence from univalence in cubical type theory

[Michael Shulman <shulman@sandiego.edu>]

Thanks, that's very interesting!

The reason I ask is that I was wondering to what extent the type "A=B"
can be regarded as "a coherent definition of equivalence" alongside
half-adjoint equivalences, maps with contractible fibers, etc.  Of
course in some sense it is (even in Book HoTT), since it's equivalent
to Equiv(A,B); but the question is how practical it is -- for
instance, is it reasonable when doing synthetic homotopy theory to
state all equivalences as equalities?

In practice, the way we often construct equivalences is to make them
out of a quasi-inverse pair, and all the standard definitions of
equivalence have the nice property that they remember the two
functions in the quasi-inverse pair judgmentally.  My experience with
the HoTT/Coq library is that this property is very useful, which is
one reason we state equivalences as equivalences rather than making
use of univalence to state them as equalities (another reason is that
it avoids "univalence-redexes" all over the theory).  Half-adjoint
equivalences have the additional nice property that they remember one
of the homotopies judgmentally, and if you're willing to prove the
coherence 2-path by hand then they can be made to remember both of the
homotopies; this seems to be much less useful than I thought it would
be when we made the choice to use half-adjoint equivalences in the
HoTT/Coq library, but it has proven useful at least once.

So I was wondering to what extent equality of types in cubical type
theory has properties like this.  It sounds from what you say like the
answer is "not much".  This makes the lack of regularity seem like a
rather more serious problem than I had previously thought.

On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 9:15 AM Licata, Dan <dlicata@wesleyan.edu> wrote:
>
> In ABCFHL, even the function fst(coe(ua(e))) : A -> B is only path-equal to fst(e) : A -> B.  If I recall correctly, the issue is that composition in the Glue type that you use to implement ua doesn’t judgementally give you f; instead there is some morally-the-identity-composition  (that would cancel with regularity) that gets stuck in.  This is because the general algorithm for composition in the glue type has to coerce in the “base” of the glue type (B in Glue [alpha -> T] B), which in the case of ua(e) = Glue [x = 0 -> (A,e), x=1 -> (B,id)] B is degenerate in x, but in general might not be.
>
> I don’t recall any cubical type theories solving this, but I don’t remember the details of all of the other variations that have been explored well enough to say for sure.
>
> > On Sep 18, 2019, at 11:42 AM, Michael Shulman <shulman@sandiego.edu> wrote:
> >
> > Let Equiv(A,B) denote the type of half-adjoint equivalences, so that
> > an e:Equiv(A,B) consists of five data: a function A -> B, a function B
> > -> A, two homotopies, and a coherence 2-path.  Using univalence, we
> > can make e into an identification ua(e) : A=B, and then back into an
> > equivalence coe(ua(e)) : Equiv(A,B), which is typally equal to e.
> >
> > Now we might wonder whether coe(ua(e)) might be in fact *judgmentally*
> > equal to e; or at least whether this might be true of some, if not
> > all, of its five components.  In Book HoTT this is clearly not the
> > case, since univalence is posited as an axiom about which we know
> > nothing else.  But what about cubical type theories?  Can any of the
> > components of an equivalence e be recovered, up to judgmental
> > equality, from coe(ua(e))?  (My guess would be that at least the
> > function A -> B, and probably also the function B -> A, can be
> > recovered, but perhaps not more.)
> >
> > --
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Homotopy Type Theory" group.
> > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to HomotopyTypeTheory+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
> > To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/HomotopyTypeTheory/CAOvivQzzSXNHs%2BzbPQTyHEuU53aHXJ0sPe4pr%2Byf0ahLGvUpVA%40mail.gmail.com.
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Homotopy Type Theory" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to HomotopyTypeTheory+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/HomotopyTypeTheory/1DF8E802-2959-4BEF-A85A-3C6E5E7B9595%40wesleyan.edu.

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Homotopy Type Theory" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to HomotopyTypeTheory+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/HomotopyTypeTheory/CAOvivQz_wY2CVp9Y5caEehVotR7w7D%3DoP6jpoUxm463pNdNHuA%40mail.gmail.com.