Resumen
Error-correcting codes are the means by which people compensate for interference in communication, and are essential for the accurate transmission and storage of digital data. All communication mechanisms and storage devices are subject to interference, typically called "noise," which corrupts communicated messages and stored data. Thus, for a communication system to faithfully transmit data, it must build redundancy into its transmissions in such a way that even if a transmission is partially corrupted, the intended message may be reconstructed. Error-correcting codes provide the mapping from messages to redundant transmissions. While a tremendous theoretical advance, more work is required before these codes can be used in practical communication systems. The decoding algorithms run in polynomial time, but need to be faster before they can be applied in practice.