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> that AND and OR are sums and products

Perhaps you meant to say that AND and XOR are products and sums.



It seems fair to think of OR as a 'saturating' sum


The issue is then boolean functions do not form a polynomial ring with this "sum", because unlike XOR, OR is not a group operation - it doesn't have a well defined inverse.


This is an important distinction between whether we are preserving structures on rings or on a group. An example would be mapping positive to negative numbers which is a group level transformation but not structure preserving for order while still being invertible




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