Block codes, weight, and distance
Oliver Pretzel · 1992
Abstract All the examples of Chapter 1 divide the message into blocks before they process it. We shall concentrate on such codes, as they form the best vehicle for introducing the ideas of coding theory. For simplicity the channel will be taken to be the binary symmetric channel. Having found some examples, we need a method to assess their performance over a given channel. The key concept that forms the basis for the assessment is the Hamming distance, which is just the number of places in which two words differ. We shall show that the worst case error-processing performance of a code is completely determined by the minimum distance between code words.