AbstractThe critical relations are the building blocks of the relational clone of a relational structure with respect to the relational operations intersection and direct product. In this paper we describe the critical relations of crowns. As a consequence, we obtain that the subpower membership problem for any crown is polynomial-time solvable.
We describe a manageable set of relations that generates the finitary relational clone of an algebra with a parallelogram term. This result applies to any algebra with a Maltsev term and to any algebra with a near unanimity term. One consequence of the main result is that on any finite set and for any finite k there are only finitely many clones of algebras with a k-ary parallelogram term which generate residually small varieties.