Rigid Binary Relations on a 4-Element Domain

Abstract

An n-ary relation ρ on a set U is strongly rigid if it is preserved only by trivial operations. It is projective if the only idempotent operations in Polρ are projections. Rosenberg, (Rocky Mt. J. Math. 3, 631–639, 1973) characterized all strongly rigid relations on a set with two elements and found a strongly rigid binary relation on every domain U of at least 3 elements. Larose and Tardif (Mult.-Valued Log. 7(5-6), 339–362, 2001) studied the projective and strongly rigid graphs and constructed large families of strongly rigid graphs. Łuczak and Nesetřil (J. Graph Theory. 47, 81–86, 2004) settled in the affirmative a conjecture of Larose and Tardif that most graphs on a large set are projective, and characterized all homogenous graphs that are projective. Łuczak and Nesetřil (SIAM J. Comput. 36(3), 835–843, 2006) confirmed a conjecture of Rosenberg that most relations on a big set are strongly rigid. In this paper, we characterize all strongly rigid relations on a set with at least three elements to answer an open question by Rosenberg, (Rocky Mt. J. Math. 3, 631–639, 1973) and we classify the binary relations on the 4-element domain by rigidity and demonstrate that there are merely 40 pairwise nonisomorphic rigid binary relations on the same domain (among them 25 are pairwise nonisomorphic strongly rigid).