Ideal error-correcting codes: Unifying algebraic and number-theoretic algorithms

Over the past five years a number of algorithms decoding some well-studied error-correcting codes far beyond their “error-correcting radii” have been developed. These algorithms, usually termed as listdecoding algorithms, originated with a list-decoder for Reed-Solomon codes [36, 17], and were soon extended to decoders for Algebraic Geometry codes [33, 17] and as also some number-theoretic codes [12, 6, 16]. In addition to their enhanced decoding capability, these algorithms enjoy the benefit of being conceptually simple, fairly general [16], and are capable of exploiting soft-decision information in algebraic decoding [24]. This article surveys these algorithms and highlights some of these features