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On the number of clonoids

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Abstract

A clonoid is a set of finitary functions from a set A to a set B that is closed under taking minors. Hence clonoids are generalizations of clones. By a classical result of Post, there are only countably many clones on a 2-element set. In contrast to that, we present continuum many clonoids for \(A = B = \{0,1\}\). More generally, for any finite set A and any 2-element algebra \({\mathbf {B}}\), we give the cardinality of the set of clonoids from A to \({\mathbf {B}}\) that are closed under the operations of \({\mathbf {B}}\). Further, for any finite set A and finite idempotent algebra \({\mathbf {B}}\) without a cube term (with \(|A|,|B|\ge 2\)) there are continuum many clonoids from A to \({\mathbf {B}}\) that are closed under the operations of \({\mathbf {B}}\); if \({\mathbf {B}}\) has a cube term there are countably many such clonoids.

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks Peter Mayr for discussions on the material in this paper and the anonymous referee for their comments and asking a question that led to Theorem 1.4.

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Correspondence to Athena Sparks.

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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DMS 1500254.

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Sparks, A. On the number of clonoids. Algebra Univers. 80, 53 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00012-019-0629-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00012-019-0629-x

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