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  1. Here's a weirdo semigroup:

    0 1 2 3 4 5
    0| 5 5 5 2 0 3
    1| 5 5 5 2 2 3
    2| 5 5 5 2 2 3
    3| 2 2 2 3 3 5
    4| 2 1 2 3 4 5
    5| 3 3 3 5 5 2

    Besides associativity, it has the properties that:
    * There is no left-identity or right-identity
    * Neither a*_ nor _*a is ever a constant function (i.e., no row nor column is constant)
    * The operator is surjective (no element fails to appear in the table)

    I wrote a constraint solver to find such semigroups, and the curious thing is that if we want to limit the number of entries where a*a = a, then it appears that n-2 such constraints are satisfiable, but n-1 of them are not.

    Relevance: blog.computationalcomplexity.o where there is a proof that at least one element must satisfy a*a = a, but Bill Gasarch asks for a "non-obvious" finite example. Is it true that all non-obvious examples must have _two_ such elements?

    I realized about halfway through that this is probably the wrong way to go about it -- it would be better to generate rules instead of tables, and test those rules for associativity and non-obviousness. Then we could find if there's some "compactly described" semigroup with the desired properties.

    #semigroup

  2. The more I learn about quasigroups, the more I think they deserve the name in a way that semigroups don't.

    Semigroups that faithfully embed into a group maybe are ok b/c they're "half the group" (e.g. positive reals inside the reals, under addition).

    But not general semigroups. They need a new name.

    #algebra #quasigroup #semigroup