BIROn - Birkbeck Institutional Research Online

# A Lower Bound for Relaxed Locally Decodable Codes

Lachish, Oded and Gur, Tom (2019) A Lower Bound for Relaxed Locally Decodable Codes. In: ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA20), 5-8 Jan 2020, Salt Lake City, U.S.. (In Press)

 Preview
Text
A_Lower_Bound_for_Relaxed_LDCs (9).pdf - Author's Accepted Manuscript

## Abstract

A locally decodable code (LDC) $C \colon \bitset^k \to \bitset^n$ is an error correcting code wherein individual bits of the message can be recovered by only querying a few bits of a noisy codeword. LDCs found a myriad of applications both in theory and in practice, ranging from probabilistically checkable proofs to distributed storage. However, despite nearly two decades of extensive study, the best known constructions of $O(1)$-query LDCs have super-polynomial blocklength. The notion of relaxed LDCs is a natural relaxation of LDCs, which aims to bypass the foregoing barrier by requiring local decoding of nearly all individual message bits, yet allowing decoding failure (but not error) on the rest. State of the art constructions of $O(1)$-query relaxed LDCs achieve blocklength $n = O\left(k^{1+ \gamma}\right)$ for an arbitrarily small constant $\gamma$. We prove a lower bound which shows that $O(1)$-query relaxed LDCs cannot achieve blocklength $n = k^{1+ o(1)}$. This resolves an open problem raised by Goldreich in 2004.

Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper) Codes, local decoding, complexity, algorithms Birkbeck Schools and Departments > School of Business, Economics & Informatics > Computer Science and Information Systems Oded Lachish 15 Jan 2020 12:45 17 Jan 2020 05:52 http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/29537