Let and
be integers.
A SOMA, or more specifically a SOMA
, is an
array
, whose entries
are
-subsets of a
-set
, such that
each element of
occurs exactly once in each row
and exactly once in each column of
, and no 2-subset
of
is contained in more than one entry of
(Soicher 1999).
A SOMA can be constructed by superposing
mutually orthogonal
Latin squares of order
with pairwise
disjoint symbol-sets, and so a SOMA
can be seen
as a generalization of
mutually orthogonal Latin
squares of order
.