The square @math of a linear error correcting code @math is the linear code spanned by the component-wise products of every pair of (non-necessarily distinct) words in @math . Squares of codes have gained attention for several applications mainly in the area of cryptography, and typically in those applications, one is concerned about some of the parameters (dimension and minimum distance) of both @math and @math . In this paper, motivated mostly by the study of this problem in the case of linear codes defined over the binary field, squares of cyclic codes are considered. General results on the minimum distance of the squares of cyclic codes are obtained, and constructions of cyclic codes @math with a relatively large dimension of @math and minimum distance of the square @math are discussed. In some cases, the constructions lead to codes @math such that both @math and @math simultaneously have the largest possible minimum distances for their length and dimensions.
A Singleton-like bound relating @math and @math was established in @cite_32 and later the family of codes attaining this bound was characterized in @cite_24 (both works treat in fact the more general setting of products of codes). In particular, unless one of the two parameters ( @math or @math ) is very restricted, Reed-Solomon codes are the only ones which can match this bound (see for more information about these results).
@cite_24 @cite_32
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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. For an error-correcting code and a distance bound, the list decoding problem is to compute all the codewords within a given distance to a received message. The bounded distance decoding problem is to find one codeword if there is at least one codeword within the given distance, or to output the empty set if there is not. Obviously the bounded distance decoding problem is not as hard as the list decoding problem. For a Reed-Solomon code [n, k] sup q , a simple counting argument shows that for any integer 0 0. We show that the discrete logarithm problem over F sub qh can be efficiently reduced by a randomized algorithm to the bounded distance decoding problem of the Reed-Solomon code [q, g - h] sub q with radius q - g. These results show that the decoding problems for the Reed-Solomon code are at least as hard as the discrete logarithm problem over finite fields. The main tools to obtain these results are an interesting connection between the problem of list-decoding of Reed-Solomon code and the problem of discrete logarithm over finite fields, and a generalization of Katz's theorem on representations of elements in an extension finite field by products of distinct linear factors. 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). The polynomial formulation of generalized ReedMuller codes, first introduced by Kasami, Lin, and Peterson is somewhat formalized and an extensive study is made of the interrelations between the m -variable approach of Kasami, Lin, and Peterson and the one-variable approach of Mattson and Solomon. The automorphism group is studied in great detail, both in the m -variable and in the one-variable language. The number of minimum weight vectors is obtained in the general case. Two ways of restricting generalized ReedMuller codes to subcodes are studied: the nonprimitive and the subfield subcodes. Connections with geometric codes are pointed out and a new series of majority decodable codes is introduced.