What does it mean for two programs to be identical to each other and in what sense can one computational artefact be said to be a copy of another one? This is the fundamental question tackled in the following paper that is now on-line:

Nicola Angius and Giuseppe Primiero, The logic of identity and copy for computational artefacts, Journal of Logic and Computation, https://academic.oup.com/logcom/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/logcom/exy012/4954042

The philosophical problem of identity has a long history which can be traced back to the work of people like Quine, Frege and Martin-Löf. In computing the problem of identity concerns the question when two programs are identical. The approach of this paper is to revisit the computational problem by (re-)connecting it to the more philosophical literature by studying in how far the different identity criteria from philosophy can be re-applied to the problem in the computational setting. The result is the determination and formal definitions using process algebras of several types of identity relations. The issues raised in this paper connect quite naturally to some other fundamental problems that came to the fore during the prelaunch roundtable of PROGRAMme at CNAM such as the questions of copyright; the relative difference between programs and algorithms and issues of simulation (see the report). Looking forward to more results in this direction!

An earlier version of the paper is available here.