Orthomodular and generalized orthomodular posets

Abstract

We prove that the 18-element non-lattice orthomodular poset depicted in the paper is the smallest one and unique up to isomorphism. Since not every Boolean poset is orthomodular, we consider the class of the so-called generalized orthomodular posets introduced by the first and third author in a previous paper. We show that this class contains all Boolean posets and we study its subclass consisting of horizontal sums of Boolean posets. For this purpose we introduce the concept of a compatibility relation and the so-called commutator of two elements. We show the relationship between these concepts and we introduce the notion of a ternary discriminator for these posets. Numerous examples illuminating these concepts and results are included in the paper.