In this paper we investigate the computational complexity of deciding if the variety generated by a given finite idempotent algebra satisfies a special type of Maltsev condition that can be specified using a certain kind of finite labelled path. This class of Maltsev conditions includes several well known conditions, such as congruence permutability and having a sequence of n Jónsson terms, for some given n. We show that for such “path defined” Maltsev conditions, the decision problem is polynomial-time solvable.

This paper investigates the computational complexity of deciding if a given finite idempotent algebra has a ternary term operation $m$ that satisfies the minority equations $m(y,x,x)\approx m(x,y,x)\approx m(x,x,y)\approx y$. We show that a common polynomial-time approach to testing for this type of condition will not work in this case and that this decision problem lies in the class NP.

In this paper we study affine completeness of generalised dihedral groups. We give a formula for the number of unary compatible functions on these groups, and we characterise for every $k\in \mathbb{N}$ the $k$-affine complete generalised dihedral groups. We find that the direct product of a 1-affine complete group with itself need not be 1-affine complete. Finally, we give an example of a nonabelian solvable affine complete group. For nilpotent groups we find a strong necessary condition for 2-affine completeness.

A group A is said to be endoprimal if its term functions are precisely the functions which permute with all endomorphisms of A. In this paper we describe endoprimal groups in the following three classes of abelian groups: torsion groups, torsionfree groups of rank at most 2, direct sums of a torsion group and a torsionfree group of rank 1.

Let A be a finite set with |A| > 2. We describe all clones on A containing the set SA of all permutations of A among its unary operations. (A clone on A is a composition closed set of finitary operations on A containing all projections). With a few exceptions such a clone C is either essentially unary or cellular i.e. there exists a monoid M of self-maps of A containing SA such that either C = (= all essentially unary operations agreeing with some f ∊ M) or C = ∪ Гh where 1 < h ≤ |A| and Гh consists of all finitary operations on A taking at most h values. The exceptions are subclones of Burle's clone or of its variant (provided |A| is even).

Let K be a category of structures with all its homomorphisms, Uα K → Set the α-th power of its forgetful functor U An α-ary implicit partial operation (O.P.I.) in K is a diagram of natural transformations and functors. We first study various properties which O P I's can have, as maximality, definability and closure under products or equalizers. Revisiting various concepts and results of Isbell, Linton, Bacsich and Herrera, we note, among other things, that the dominion (resp. the stable dominion) of a subset of a structure K is its closure under O P I's (resp. under equalizer-closed O P I's), and we show that in a variety, all epis are surjective (resp. all monos are regular) iff all limit-closed (resp. product-closed) O P I's are restrictions of total implicit operations.