Long code (mathematics)
In and coding theory, the long code is an error-correcting code that is locally decodable. Long codes have an extremely poor rate, but play a fundamental role in the theory of .
Contents
Definition
Let for
be the list of all functions from
. Then the long code encoding of a message
is the string
where
denotes concatenation of strings. This string has length
.
The is a subcode of the long code, and can be obtained by only using functions that are when interpreted as functions
on the with two elements. Since there are only
such functions, the block length of the Walsh-Hadamard code is
.
An equivalent definition of the long code is as follows: The Long code encoding of is defined to be the truth table of the Boolean dictatorship function on the
th coordinate, i.e., the truth table of
with
. Thus, the Long code encodes a
-bit string as a
-bit string.
Properties
The long code does not contain repetitions, in the sense that the function computing the
th bit of the output is different from any function
computing the
th bit of the output for
. Among all codes that do not contain repetitions, the long code has the longest possible output. Moreover, it contains all non-repeating codes as a subcode.