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Gruber P. Convex and Discrete Geometry

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29.3 Error Correcting Codes <strong>and</strong> Ball Packing<br />

29 Packing of Balls <strong>and</strong> Positive Quadratic Forms 427<br />

The Minkowski–Hlawka theorem guarantees the existence of (comparatively) dense<br />

lattice packings of balls <strong>and</strong>, more generally, of centrally symmetric convex bodies,<br />

but does not provide constructions of such.<br />

Starting with the work of Leech [637], error correcting codes turned out to be a<br />

powerful tool for the construction of dense lattice <strong>and</strong> non-lattice packings of balls.<br />

Work in this direction culminated in the construction of Rush [862] of lattice packings<br />

of balls of density 2 −d+o(d) , thus reaching the Minkowski–Hlawka bound. An<br />

explicit construction of dense lattice or non-lattice packings based on error correcting<br />

codes requires codes which can be given explicitly. Unfortunately this is not the<br />

case for the codes used by Rush.<br />

A different way to construct dense packings, in dimensions which are not too<br />

large, is to pack congruent layers of ball packings in stacks to get a layer of 1dimension<br />

more, <strong>and</strong> use induction.<br />

In this section we first give the necessary definitions from coding theory <strong>and</strong><br />

describe two constructions of ball packings based on codes due to Leech <strong>and</strong> Sloane<br />

[638]. Then the layer construction is outlined.<br />

For more information, see the monographs of Conway <strong>and</strong> Sloane [220] <strong>and</strong><br />

Zong [1049] <strong>and</strong> the survey of Rush [863] on sphere packing.<br />

Binary Error Correcting Codes<br />

In a data transmission system it is the task of error correcting codes to correct errors<br />

which might have occurred during the transmission in the channel. See Sect. 33.4 for<br />

some information.<br />

A (binary error correcting) code C of length d consists of a set of ordered dtuples<br />

of 0s <strong>and</strong> 1s, the so-called code-words. Clearly, C can be identified with a<br />

subset of the set of vertices of the unit cube {x : 0 ≤ xi ≤ 1} in Ed or with a subset<br />

of Fd , where F is the Galois field consisting of 0 <strong>and</strong> 1. The 0s <strong>and</strong> 1s in a code-word<br />

are called its letters. Given two code-words of C, the number of letters in which they<br />

differ is their Hamming distance. The minimum of the Hamming distances of any<br />

two distinct code-words of C is the minimum distance of C. A code C of length d<br />

consisting of M code-words <strong>and</strong> of minimum distance m is called a (d, M, m)-code.<br />

A (d, M, m)-code C is linear of dimension k if it is a k-dimensional linear subspace<br />

of the d-dimensional vector space Fd over F, i.e. Fd with coordinatewise addition<br />

modulo 2 <strong>and</strong> scalar multiplication. In this case C is called a [d, k, m]-code. Ifthe<br />

result of the transmission in the channel of a code-word is a word, i.e. a d-tuple of<br />

0s <strong>and</strong> 1s, we assign to it (one of) the closest code-word(s). This is the original code-<br />

word if the number of errors is at most ⌈ m 2<br />

⌉−1. Thus, given d, a code is good if, for<br />

given number of code-words, its minimum distance is large, or for given minimum<br />

distance the number of code-words is large.

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