Title
Locally Testable Codes Require Redundant Testers
Abstract
Locally testable codes (LTCs) are error-correcting codes for which membership, in the code, of a given word can be tested by examining it in very few locations. Most known constructions of locally testable codes are linear codes, and give error-correcting codes whose duals have (superlinearly) {\em many} small weight codewords. Examining this feature appears to be one of the promising approaches to proving limitation results for (i.e., upper bounds on the rate of) LTCs. Unfortunately till now it was not even known if LTCs need to be non-trivially redundant, i.e., need to have {\em one} linear dependency among the low-weight codewords in its dual. In this paper we give the first lower bound of this form, by showing that every positive rate constant query strong LTC must have linearly many redundant low-weight codewords in its dual. We actually prove the stronger claim that the {\em actual test itself} must use a linear number of redundant dual codewords (beyond the minimum number of basis elements required to characterize the code); in other words, non-redundant (in fact, low redundancy) local testing is impossible.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1137/090779875
SIAM Journal on Computing
Keywords
DocType
Volume
property testing
Conference
39
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
7
1093-0159
13
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.58
24
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Eli Ben-Sasson1164186.98
V. Guruswami23205247.96
Tali Kaufman349938.33
Madhu Sudan45616591.68
Michael Viderman5666.43