The Bergman‐Shelah preorder on transformation semigroups

Let $\mathbb {N}^\mathbb {N}Let $\mathbb {N}^\mathbb {N}$ be the semigroup of all mappings on the natural numbers $\mathbb {N}$, and let U and V be subsets of $\mathbb {N}^\mathbb {N}$. We write U?V if there exists a countable subset C of $\mathbb {N}^\mathbb {N}$ such that U is contained in the subsemigroup generated by V and C. We give several results about the structure of the preorder ?. In particular, we show that a certain statement about this preorder is equivalent to the Continuum Hypothesis. The preorder ? is analogous to one introduced by Bergman and Shelah on subgroups of the symmetric group on $\mathbb {N}$. The results in this paper suggest that the preorder on subsemigroups of $\mathbb {N}^\mathbb {N}$ is much more complicated than that on subgroups of the symmetric group.