A locally decodable code (LDC) is an error-correcting code that allows a single bit of the original message to be decoded with high probability by only examining (or querying) a small number of bits of a possibly corrupted codeword. This property could be useful, say, in a context where information is being transmitted over a noisy channel, and only a small subset of the data is required at a particular time and there is no need to decode the entire message at once. Locally decodable codes are not a subset of locally testable codes, though there is some overlap between the two. Codewords are generated from the original message using an algorithm that introduces a certain amount of redundancy into the codeword; thus, the codeword is always longer than the original message. This redundancy is distributed across the codeword and allows the original message to be recovered with good probability even in the presence of errors. The more redundant the codeword, the more resilient it is against errors, and the fewer queries required to recover a bit of the original message.
Overview More formally, a ( q , δ , ϵ ) {\displaystyle (q,\delta ,\epsilon )} -locally decodable code encodes an n {\displaystyle n} -bit message x {\displaystyle x} to an N {\displaystyle N} -bit codeword C ( x ) {\displaystyle C(x)} such that any bit x i {\displaystyle x_{i}} of the message can be recovered with probability 1 − ϵ {\displaystyle 1-\epsilon } by using a randomized decoding algorithm that queries only q {\displaystyle q} bits of the codeword C ( x ) {\displaystyle C(x)} , even if up to δ N {\displaystyle \delta N} locations of the codeword have been corrupted. Furthermore, a perfectly smooth local decoder is a decoder such that, in addition to always generating the correct output given access to an uncorrupted codeword, for every j ∈ [ q ] {\displaystyle j\in [q]} and i ∈ [ n ] {\displaystyle i\in [n]} the j t h {\displaystyle j^{th}} query to recover the i t h {\displaystyle i^{th}} bit is uniform over [ N ] {\displaystyle [N]} . (The notation [ y ] {\displaystyle [y]} denotes the set { 1 , … , y } {\displaystyle \{1,\ldots ,y\}} ). Informally, this means that the set of queries required to decode any given bit are uniformly distributed over the codeword. Local list decoders are another interesting subset of local decoders. List decoding is useful when a codeword is corrupted in more than δ / 2 {\displaystyle \delta /2} places, where δ {\displaystyle \delta } is the minimum Hamming distance between two codewords. In this case, it is no longer possible to identify exactly which original message has been encoded, since there could be multiple codewords within δ {\displaystyle \delta } distance of the corrupted codeword. However, given a radius ϵ {\displaystyle \epsilon } , it is possible to identify the set of messages that encode to codewords that are within ϵ {\displaystyle \epsilon } of the corrupted codeword. An upper bound on the size of the set of messages can be determined by δ {\displaystyle \delta } and ϵ {\displaystyle \epsilon } . Locally decodable codes can also be concatenated, where a message is encoded first using one scheme, and the resulting codeword is encoded again using a different scheme. (Note that, in this context, concatenation is the term used by scholars to refer to what is usually called composition). This might be useful if, for example, the first code has some desirable properties with respect to rate, but it has some undesirable property, such as producing a codeword over a non-binary alphabet. The second code can then transform the result of the first encoding over a non-binary alphabet to a binary alphabet. The final encoding is still locally decodable, and requires additional steps to decode both layers of encoding.
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