cateq is a program in OCaml which implements the solution to the word problem on strict omega-categories. It is inspired from the article of M. Makkai “The word problem on computads”. A description of the algorithm used by cateq can be found in S. Forest “Computational Descriptions of Higher Categories” (PhD thesis) and here.

Directly try cateq from a browser

For now, cateq can be tried from a browser here. Alternatively, you can launch the same webpage from the repository. Once the repository is cloned, just do

firefox web/index.html

in the repo directory.

Compile the sources

Install opam

In order to compile, we need an OCaml compiler and some additional packages. The easiest way to install them is using opam. The latter can be installed with the following commands:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install opam m4
opam init

Build cateq

We first install the required OCaml compiler and packages with the following command:

opam install ocaml ocamlbuild menhir

We can now compile cateq with the following commands executed in the src/ directory:

eval `opam config env`
make cateq

Build the javascript code

In order to convert the OCaml code to javascript, we need additional packages that we can install with

opam install js_of_ocaml js_of_ocaml-ppx

The javascript code can then be compiled with the following commands executed in the src/ directory:

eval `opam config env`
make web

The javascript file from the web/ directory is then updated, and one can use it by executing

firefox web/index.html

as above.

Use cateq

Once cateq is built, you can run it from the src/ directory with:

./cateq

For some examples on how to use cateq, open web/index.html in a browser.