Cirquents come in a variety of forms, but they all share one main characteristic feature, making them different from the more traditional objects of syntactic manipulation.
The approach was introduced by G. Japaridze[1] as an alternative proof theory capable of "taming" various nontrivial fragments of his computability logic, which had otherwise resisted all axiomatization attempts within the traditional proof-theoretic frameworks.
Unlike cirquent calculus, neither approach thus permits mixed cases where some identical subformulas are shared and some not.
Among the later-found applications of cirquent calculus was the use of it to define a semantics for purely propositional independence-friendly logic.
[6] Syntactically, cirquent calculi are deep inference systems with the unique feature of subformula-sharing.