Paper 3, Section I, K

Coding and Cryptography
Part II, 2021

Let d2d \geqslant 2. Define the Hamming code CC of length 2d12^{d}-1. Explain what it means to be a perfect code and show that CC is a perfect code.

Suppose you are using the Hamming code of length 2d12^{d}-1 and you receive the message 11110111 \ldots 10 of length 2d12^{d}-1. How would you decode this message using minimum distance decoding? Explain why this leads to correct decoding if at most one channel error has occurred.