The high-level goal is currently to reduce matching to dual interpolation, that is, solving problems of the form
x M11 ... M1n ~ N1
x M21 ... M2n ~ N2
...
x Mm1 ... Mmn ~ Nm
where all the Ms and Ns are completely without free variables, and the ~s can be (independently of one another) either == or !=.
Somehow we are careening towards a model-theoretic proof of this.
Now the definition of a model of the STLC hasn't been explicitly given during class, so the attempt to do part of the construction of the free model over a handful of constants left the class rather nonplussed, I think. I didn't remember it myself, so I looked at the textbook just now, and a model is in fact (as my hazy memory suggested) an assignment of subsets of the appropriate function spaces to types in such a way that "enough" functions still remain to interpret all syntactic terms, but I still have to digest the formal meaning of "enough" a little more before I can fully recapitulate the logical relations shenanigans that went on today.
Quickly, though, the main idea was:
(1) we start with a "sufficiently big" finite set as the interpretation of the type o, and water it diligently and grow from it the usual full-function-spaces model. (We don't know how big "sufficiently" is yet — I think it eventually comes from the unification problem we want to solve.)
(2) we weed out all the terms in this model that are not λ-definable, leaving in only the ones that are
(3) we observe that by taking things out (suppose we threw out some element k of the model at type A), we might have caused certain terms at one type up (e.g., f, g : A → o) to collapse, because perhaps f k != g k was the very last bit of evidence to show that f != g, and we just threw k out of the model, so now extensionality forces us to equate f and g.
...so collapse everything that needs to be collapsed!
(4) We worry that the equivalence relation that we defined for the above collapse is well-defined in every sense it needs to be - but we prove by logical relations somehow that it is.
And so I get the impression that we're going to somehow use the assumption that dual interpolation is decidable to get around the undecidability of λ-definability, and still somehow simply "iterate over" a finite model. That is, if we're looking for something to plug in for x : A such that N(x) = M (at the type of binary trees) we just find a finite model Φ big enough to distinguish M from every other binary tree, and then try to crawl over the elements of &Phi's interpretation of A to see if we can find something to substitute for x. Naively we might get fooled and say "yes this matching problem is solvable" when it ain't, because Φ might have some elements that aren't λ-definable. Thus, I suppose, the reason that we're trying to construct the free model (which is sort of minimal in the sense that the full model is maximal) which only has the λ-definable terms.