On the complexity of minimum distance decoding of long linear codes

We suggest a decoding algorithm of q-ary linear codes, which we call supercode decoding. It ensures the error probability that approaches the error probability of minimum-distance decoding as the length of the code grows. For n/spl rarr//spl infin/ the algorithm has the maximum-likelihood performance. The asymptotic complexity of supercode decoding is exponentially smaller than the complexity of all other methods known. The algorithm develops the ideas of covering-set decoding and split syndrome decoding.