Clones of implicit operations

There is a close connection between a variety and its clone. The clone of a variety is a multibased algebra, where the different universes are the sets of n-ary terms over this variety for every natural number n and where the operations describe the superposition of terms of different arities. All projections are added as nullary operations. Subvarieties correspond to homomorphic images of clones. Subclones can be described by reducts of varieties, isomorphic clones by equivalent varieties. Clone identities correspond to hyperidentities and varieties of clones to hypervarieties. Pseudovarieties are classes of finite algebras which are closed under taking of subalgebras, homomorphic images and finite direct products. Pseudovarieties are important in the theories of finite state automata, rational languages, finite semigroups and their connections. In a very natural way, there arises the question for the clone of a pseudovariety. In the present paper, we will describe this algebraic structure. Received April 6, 2004; accepted in final form March 28, 2005.