We introduce the notion of logarithmically concave (or log-concave) sequences in Coding Theory. A sequence $a_0, a_1, \dots, a_n$ of real numbers is called log-concave if $a_i^2 \ge a_{i-1}a_{i+1}$ for all $1 \le i \le n-1$. A natural sequence of positive numbers in coding theory is the weight distribution of a linear code consisting of the nonzero values among $A_i$'s where $A_i$ denotes the number of codewords of weight $i$. We call a linear code log-concave if its nonzero weight distribution is log-concave. Our main contribution is to show that all binary general Hamming codes of length $2^r -1$ ($r=3$ or $r \ge 5$), the binary extended Hamming codes of length $2^r ~(r \ge 3)$, and the second order Reed-Muller codes $R(2, m)~ (m \ge 2)$ are all log-concave while the homogeneous and projective second order Reed-Muller codes are either log-concave, or 1-gap log-concave. Furthermore, we show that any MDS $[n, k]$ code over $\mathbb F_q$ satisfying $3 \leqslant k \leqslant n/2 +3$ is log-concave if $q \geqslant q_0(n, k)$ which is the larger root of a quadratic polynomial. Hence, we expect that the concept of log-concavity in coding theory will stimulate many interesting problems.
翻译:本文在编码理论中引入了对数凹序列的概念。一个实数序列 $a_0, a_1, \dots, a_n$ 被称为对数凹的,如果对所有 $1 \le i \le n-1$ 满足 $a_i^2 \ge a_{i-1}a_{i+1}$。在编码理论中,一个自然的正数序列是线性码的重量分布,它由 $A_i$ 中的非零值组成,其中 $A_i$ 表示重量为 $i$ 的码字数量。如果一个线性码的非零重量分布是对数凹的,我们则称该线性码是对数凹的。我们的主要贡献是证明了所有长度为 $2^r -1$ ($r=3$ 或 $r \ge 5$) 的二进制一般汉明码、长度为 $2^r ~(r \ge 3)$ 的二进制扩展汉明码以及二阶 Reed-Muller 码 $R(2, m)~ (m \ge 2)$ 都是对数凹的,而齐次和射影二阶 Reed-Muller 码要么是对数凹的,要么是 1-间隔对数凹的。此外,我们证明了在 $\mathbb F_q$ 上满足 $3 \leqslant k \leqslant n/2 +3$ 的任何 MDS $[n, k]$ 码,如果 $q \geqslant q_0(n, k)$,则是对数凹的,其中 $q_0(n, k)$ 是一个二次多项式的较大根。因此,我们期望编码理论中的对数凹性概念将激发许多有趣的问题。