Petar Marković

Varieties with few subalgebras of powers

The Constraint Satisfaction Problem Dichotomy Conjecture of Feder and Vardi (1999) has in the last 10 years been profitably reformulated as a conjecture about the set SP fin (A) of subalgebras of finite Cartesian powers of a finite universal algebra A. One particular strategy, advanced by Dalmau in his doctoral thesis (2000), has confirmed the conjecture for a certain class of finite algebras A which, among other things, have the property that the number of subalgebras of A n is bounded by an exponential polynomial. In this paper we characterize the finite algebras A with this property, which we call having few subpowers, and develop a representation theory for the subpowers of algebras having few subpowers. Our characterization shows that algebras having few subpowers are the finite members of a newly discovered and surprisingly robust Maltsev class defined by the existence of a special term we call an edge term. We also prove some tight connections between the asymptotic behavior of the number of subalgebras of A n and some related functions on the one hand, and some standard algebraic properties of A on the other hand. The theory developed here was applied to the Constraint Satisfaction Problem Dichotomy Conjecture, completing Dalmaus strategy.

Finitely Related Clones and Algebras with Cube Terms

Aichinger et al. (2011) have proved that every finite algebra with a cube-term (equivalently, with a parallelogram-term; equivalently, having few subpowers) is finitely related. Thus finite algebras with cube terms are inherently finitely related—every expansion of the algebra by adding more operations is finitely related. In this paper, we show that conversely, if A is a finite idempotent algebra and every idempotent expansion of A is finitely related, then A has a cube-term. We present further characterizations of the class of finite idempotent algebras having cube-terms, one of which yields, for idempotent algebras with finitely many basic operations and a fixed finite universe A, a polynomial-time algorithm for determining if the algebra has a cube-term. We also determine the maximal non-finitely related idempotent clones over A. The number of these clones is finite.

Equations of tournaments are not finitely based

The aim of this paper is to prove that there is no finite basis for the equations satisfied by tournaments. This solves a problem posed in Muller et al. (Discrete Mathematics 11 (1975) 37–66).

QCSP on Semicomplete Digraphs

We study the (non-uniform) quantified constraint satisfaction problem QCSP(H) as H ranges over semicomplete digraphs. We obtain a complexity-theoretic trichotomy: QCSP(H) is either in P, is NP-complete or is Pspace-complete. The largest part of our work is the algebraic classification of precisely which semicompletes enjoy only essentially unary polymorphisms, which is combinatorially interesting in its own right.

Quantified Constraint Satisfaction Problem on Semicomplete Digraphs

We study the (non-uniform) quantified constraint satisfaction problem QCSP(H) as H ranges over semicomplete digraphs. We obtain a complexity-theoretic trichotomy: QCSP(H) is either in P, is NP-complete, or is Pspace-complete. The largest part of our work is the algebraic classification of precisely which semicomplete digraphs enjoy only essentially unary polymorphisms, which is combinatorially interesting in its own right.