Transversals, plexes, and multiplexes in iterated quasigroups (Q1627205)

Summary: A \(d\)-ary quasigroup of order \(n\) is a \(d\)-ary operation over a set of cardinality \(n\) such that the Cayley table of the operation is a \(d\)-dimensional latin hypercube of the same order. Given a binary quasigroup \(G\), the \(d\)-iterated quasigroup \(G^{\left[d\right]}\) is a \(d\)-ary quasigroup that is a \(d\)-time composition of \(G\) with itself. A \(k\)-multiplex (a \(k\)-plex) \(K\) in a \(d\)-dimensional latin hypercube \(Q\) of order \(n\) or in the corresponding \(d\)-ary quasigroup is a multiset (a set) of \(kn\) entries such that each hyperplane and each symbol of \(Q\) is covered by exactly \(k\) elements of \(K\). It is common to call 1-plexes transversals. In this paper we prove that there exists a constant \(c(G,k)\) such that if a \(d\)-iterated quasigroup \(G\) of order \(n\) has a \(k\)-multiplex then for large \(d\) the number of its \(k\)-multiplexes is asymptotically equal to \(c(G,k) \left(\frac{(kn)!}{k!^n}\right)^{d-1}\). As a corollary we obtain that if the number of transversals in the Cayley table of a \(d\)-iterated quasigroup \(G\) of order \(n\) is nonzero then asymptotically it is \(c(G,1)~ n!^{d-1}\). In addition, we provide limit constants and recurrence formulas for the numbers of transversals in two iterated quasigroups of order \(5\), characterize a typical \(k\)-multiplex and estimate numbers of partial \(k\)-multiplexes and transversals in \(d\)-iterated quasigroups.