A Lower Bound on List Size for List Decoding

A q-ary error-correcting code C ⊆ {1, 2,..., q} n is said to be list decodable to radius ρ with list size L if every Hamming ball of radius ρ contains at most L codewords of C. We prove that in order for a q-ary code to be list-decodable up to radius (1 − 1/q)(1 − ε)n, we must have L = Ω(1/ε 2). Specifically, we prove that there exists a constant cq> 0 and a function fq such that for small enough ε> 0, if C is list-decodable to radius (1 − 1/q)(1 − ε)n with list size cq/ε 2, then C has at most fq(ε) codewords, independent of n. This result is asymptotically tight (treating q as a constant), since such codes with an exponential (in n) number of codewords are known for list size L = O(1/ε 2). A result similar to ours is implicit in Blinovsky [Bli1] for the binary (q = 2) case. Our proof is simpler and works for all alphabet sizes, and provides more intuition for why the lower bound arises.