Characterizations of 'almost associative' binary operations generating a minimal clone are given for two interpretations of the term 'almost associative'. One of them uses the associative spectrum, the other one uses the index of nonassociativity to measure how far an operation is from being associative.
Which subgroups of the symmetric group Sn arise as invariance groups of n-variable functions defined on a k-element domain? It appears that the higher the difference n-k, the more difficult it is to answer this question. For k ≤ n, the answer is easy: all subgroups of Sn are invariance groups. We give a complete answer in the cases k = n-1 and k = n-2, and we also give a partial answer in the general case: we describe invariance groups when n is much larger than n-k. The proof utilizes Galois connections...
Page 1