Canonicity for Cubical Type Theory

Abstract

Cubical type theory is an extension of Martin-L\"of type theory recently proposed by Cohen, Coquand, M\"ortberg and the author which allows for direct manipulation of $n$-dimensional cubes and where Voevodsky's Univalence Axiom is provable. In this paper we prove canonicity for cubical type theory: any natural number in a context build from only name variables is judgmentally equal to a numeral. To achieve this we formulate a typed and deterministic operational semantics and employ a computability argument adapted to a presheaf-like setting.