In many situations it is desirable to consider two group elements the same if they differ by an element of a given subgroup. For example, in D4 above, once a reflection is performed, the square never gets back to the r2 configuration by just applying the rotation operations (and no further reflections), i.e. the rotation operations are irrelevant to the question whether a reflection has been performed. Cosets are used to formalize this insight: a subgroup H defines left and right cosets, which can be thought of as translations of H by arbitrary group elements g. In symbolic terms, the left and right cosets of H containing g are

When is it preferable to consider two group elements to be the same?