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.
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. 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).