We determine conditions on q for the nonexistence of deep holes of the standard Reed-Solomon code of dimension k over F_q generated by polynomials of degree k+d. Our conditions rely on the existence of q-rational points with nonzero, pairwise-distinct coordinates of a certain family of hypersurfaces defined over F_q. We show that the hypersurfaces under consideration are invariant under the action of the symmetric group of permutations of the coordinates. This allows us to obtain critical information concerning the singular locus of these hypersurfaces, from which the existence of q-rational points is established.
In @cite_2 the existence of deep holes is reconsidered. Using the Weil estimate for certain character sums as in @cite_10 , the authors obtain the following result.
@cite_10 @cite_2
1565759886 2077712820 2050777560 2012238497
For generalized Reed-Solomon codes, it has been proved [7] that the problem of determining if a received word is a deep hole is co-NP-complete. The reduction relies on the fact that the evaluation set of the code can be exponential in the length of the code - a property that practical codes do not usually possess. In this paper, we first present a much simpler proof of the same result. We then consider the problem for standard Reed-Solomon codes, i.e. the evaluation set consists of all the nonzero elements in the field. We reduce the problem of identifying deep holes to deciding whether an absolutely irreducible hypersurface over a finite field contains a rational point whose coordinates are pairwise distinct and nonzero. By applying Cafure-Matera estimation of rational points on algebraic varieties, we prove that the received vector (f(α))α∈Fpfor the Reed-Solomon [p - 1, k]p, k < p1 4-Ɛ, cannot be a deep hole, whenever f(x) is a polynomial of degree k + d for 1 ≤ d ≤ p3 13-Ɛ. The complexity of decoding the standard Reed-Solomon code is a well known open problem in coding theory. The main problem is to compute the error distance of a received word. Using the Weil bound for character sum estimate, we show that the error distance can be determined precisely when the degree of the received word is small. As an application of our method, we give a significant improvement of the recent bound of Cheng-Murray on non-existence of deep holes (words with maximal error distance). Weil's character sum estimate is used to study the problem of constructing generators for the multiplicative group of a finite field. An application to the distribution of irreducible polynomials is given, which confirms an asymptotic version of a conjecture of Hansen-Mullen. We consider the problem of computing the smallest possible distortion for embedding of a given n-point metric space into ℝ d , where d is fixed (and small). For d = 1, it was known that approximating the minimum distortion with a factor better than roughly n 1 12 is NP-hard. From this result we derive inapproximability with a factor roughly n 1 (22d-10) for every fixed d ≥ 2, by a conceptually very simple reduction. However, the proof of correctness involves a nontrivial result in geometric topology (whose current proof is based on ideas due to Jussi Vaisala), For d > 3, we obtain a stronger inapproximability result by a different reduction: assuming P≠NP, no polynomial-time algorithm can distinguish between spaces embeddable in ℝ d with constant distortion from spaces requiring distortion at least n c d , for a constant c > 0. The exponent c d has the correct order of magnitude, since every n-point metric space can be embedded in ℝ d with distortion O(n 2 d log 3 2 n) and such an embedding can be constructed in polynomial time by random projection. For d = 2, we give an example of a metric space that requires a large distortion for embedding in ℝ 2 , while all not too large subspaces of it embed almost isometrically.