Congruence distributive quasivarieties whose finitely subdirectly irreducible members form a universal class (Q909692)

For a quasivariety Q of algebras and its member A denote by \(Con_ QA\) the set of all congruence relations \(\theta\) on A such that the quotient algebra A/\(\theta\) belongs to Q. A quasivariety Q is called congruence- distributive if for every member A of Q the lattice \(Con_ QA\) is distributive. A quasivariety Q is said to have equationally definable principal congruence meets (EDPCM for short) if there exists a finite system \[ \Delta =\{(p_ i(x,y,z,w),q_ i(x,y,z,w)):\quad i=0,1,...,n- 1\} \] of pairs of 4-ary terms such that for all \(A\in Q\) and a,b,c,d\(\in A:\) \[ \theta^ A_ Q(a,b)\cap \theta^ A_ Q(c,d)=\bigvee_{i<n}\theta^ A_ Q(p^ A_ i(a,b,c,d),q^ A_ i(a,b,c,d)), \] where the join \(\bigvee\) is formed in \(Con_ QA\). Seven pairwise equivalent conditions are stated which characterize quasivarieties Q with EDPCM (Theorem 2.3). In particular, the quasivarieties with EDPCM are exactly those which are congruence distributive and whose finitely subdirectly irreducible members form a universal class. Theorem 3.4 states that a quasivariety with EDPCM and of finite type is finitely based iff the class of its finitely subdirectly irreducible members is strictly elementary. Some open problems are formulated. For example: is every finitely generated and congruence distributive quasivariety Q of algebras of finite type finitely based?