We establish several properties of Bulatov's higher commutator operations in congruence permutable varieties. We use higher commutators to prove that for a finite nilpotent algebra of finite type that is a product of algebras of prime power order and generates a congruence modular variety, affine completeness is a decidable property. Moreover, we show that in such algebras, we can check in polynomial time whether two given polynomial terms induce the same function.

Given the congruence lattice L of a finite algebra A with a Mal'cev term, we look for those sequences of operations on L that are sequences of higher commutator operations of expansions of A. The properties of higher commutators proved so far delimit the number of such sequences: the number is always at most countably infinite; if it is infinite, then L is the union of two proper subintervals with nonempty intersection.

In this note we prove that a Mal’cev algebra is 2-supernilpotent ([1, 1, 1] =  0) if and only if it is polynomially equivalent to a special expanded group. This generalizes Gumm’s result that a Mal’cev algebra is abelian if and only if it is polynomially equivalent to a module over a ring.

The polynomial functions of an algebra preserve all congruence relations. In addition, if the algebra is finite, they preserve the labelling of the congruence lattice in the sense of Tame Congruence Theory. The question is for which algebras every congruence preserving function, or at least every function that preserves the labelling of the congruence lattice, is a polynomial function. In this paper, we investigate this question for finite algebras that have a group reduct.