Long code (mathematics)

Math logic
Classification
Type	Block code
Block length	$2^{n}$ for some $n\in \mathbb {N}$
Message length	$\log n$
Alphabet size	$2$
Notation	$(2^{n},\log n)_{2}$-code

In theoretical computer science 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 hardness of approximation.

Definition

Let $f_{1},\dots ,f_{2^{n}}:\{0,1\}^{k}\to \{0,1\}$ for $k=\log n$ be the list of all functions from $\{0,1\}^{k}\to \{0,1\}$. Then the long code encoding of a message $x\in \{0,1\}^{k}$ is the string $f_{1}(x)\circ f_{2}(x)\circ \dots \circ f_{2^{n}}(x)$ where $\circ$ denotes concatenation of strings. This string has length $2^{n}=2^{2^{k}}$.

The Walsh-Hadamard code is a subcode of the long code, and can be obtained by only using functions $f_{i}$ that are linear functions when interpreted as functions $\mathbb {F} _{2}^{k}\to \mathbb {F} _{2}$ on the finite field with two elements. Since there are only $2^{k}$ such functions, the block length of the Walsh-Hadamard code is $2^{k}$.

An equivalent definition of the long code is as follows: The Long code encoding of $j\in [n]$ is defined to be the truth table of the Boolean dictatorship function on the $j$th coordinate, i.e., the truth table of $f:\{0,1\}^{n}\to \{0,1\}$ with $f(x_{1},\dots ,x_{n})=x_{j}$. Thus, the Long code encodes a $(\log n)$-bit string as a $2^{n}$-bit string.

Properties

The long code does not contain repetitions, in the sense that the function $f_{i}$ computing the $i$th bit of the output is different from any function $f_{j}$ computing the $j$th bit of the output for $j\neq i$. 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.