The Hamming Bound is a fundamental concept in coding theory that establishes a limit on the number of codewords in a block code, given its parameters. It states that for a code of length that can correct up to errors, the total number of distinct codewords must satisfy the inequality:
where is the number of codewords in the code, and is the binomial coefficient representing the number of ways to choose positions from . This bound ensures that the spheres of influence (or spheres of radius ) for each codeword do not overlap, maintaining unique decodability. If a code meets this bound, it is said to achieve the Hamming Bound, indicating that it is optimal in terms of error correction capability for the given parameters.
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