Subquandles of affine quandles (Q724276)

A quandle is a groupoid \((Q, \cdot )\) which is: (a) idempotent (i.e. it obeys the identity \(x \cdot x = x\) for all \(x\in Q\)); (b) left unique solvable (i.e. for all \(a, b\in Q\), there exists a unique \(x\in Q\) such that \(a \cdot x = b\), which is usually denoted by \(x = a\backslash b\)) and (c) left distributive (i.e. it satisfies the identity \(x \cdot (y \cdot z) = (x \cdot y) \cdot (x \cdot z)\) for all \(x,y,z\in Q\)). A quandle \((Q, \cdot )\) is called medial (or entropic) if it satisfies the identity \((x \cdot y) \cdot (u \cdot v) = (x \cdot u) \cdot (y \cdot v)\) for all \(x,y,u,v\in Q\). Let \((G, +)\) be an abelian group, \(\alpha\) an automorphism of \((G, +)\), and define a binary operation (\(\star\)) on the \(G\) by \(a \star b = (1 - \alpha)(a) + \alpha(b)\) for all \(a,b\in G\). Then, \((G, \star)\) is a medial quandle and is usually denoted by \(\mathrm{Aff}(A, f)\) and said to be affine over the group \((G, +)\). A quandle that is embeddable into an affine quandle is referred to as quasi-affine. Free medial quandles are quasi-affine, but not affine. Affine quandles (also known as Alexander quandles) play an important role in quandle theory from algebraic perspective and in applications in knot theory. In this article under review, the authors consider the structure and properties of quandles that are embeddable into affine quandles (i.e. that are isomorphic to a subquandle of an affine quandles). Their motivation is mainly algebraic with attention on computational aspects. They consider a structural theorem which is achieved using a special kind of central extension. They also establish a computationally feasible characterization of quasi-affine quandles. The key property behind their results is abelianness and semiregularity of the displacement group which are reflections of their main results (Theorem 2.2 and Theorem 2.3). These results serve as confirmation of a conjecture for the class of quandles; an open problem of whether every idempotent algebraic structure satisfying certain syntactic condition called abelianness is quasi-affine. They present polynomial-time Algorithm 7.1 and Algorithm 7.4 for recognition of affine and quasi-affine quandles (in multiplication table form). These two algorithms are based on the properties of the displacement group as described in Theorem 2.2 and Theorem 2.3.