Varieties of Lazy Magmas Characterized by Forbidden Substructure Theorems

Abstract

A magma (or groupoid) is a set with a binary operation $(A,f)$. Roughly speaking, a magma is said to be lazy if compositions such as $f(x,f(f(y,z),u))$ depend on at most two variables. Recently, Kaprinai, Machida and Waldhauser described the lattice of all the varieties of lazy groupoids. A forbidden structure theorem is one that charcaterizes a smaller class $A$ inside a larger class $B$ as all the elements in $B$ that avoid some substructures. For example, a lattice is distributive (smaller class $A$) if and only if it is a lattice (larger class $B$) and avoids the pentagon and the diamond. In this paper we provide a characterization of all pairs of lazy groupoid varieties $A\le B$ by forbidden substructure theorems. Some of the results are straightforward, but some other are very involved. All of these results and proofs were found using a computational tool that proves theorems of this type (for many different classes of relational algebras) and that we make available to every mathematician.