Homotopy Canonicity for Cubical Type Theory

Abstract

Cubical type theory provides a constructive justification of homotopy type theory and satisfies canonicity: every natural number is convertible to a numeral. A crucial ingredient of cubical type theory is a path lifting operation which is explained computationally by induction on the type involving several non-canonical choices. In this paper we show by a sconing argument that if we remove these equations for the path lifting operation from the system, we still retain homotopy canonicity: every natural number is path equal to a numeral.