Reed-Solomon List Decoding Breakthrough Resolves Major Open Problem in Coding Theory

AlexKontorovich · x · 2026-09-04

A long-standing open problem in coding theory has been resolved: whether explicit Reed-Solomon codes can be list decoded beyond the Guruswami-Sudan breakthrough. A team of Joshua Brakensiek, Yeyuan Chen, Louie Putterman, Zihan Zhang, and Kai Zhe Zheng published ECCC report TR26-164, presenting a deterministic polynomial-time list decoding algorithm for Reed-Solomon codes over prime fields that approaches list decoding capacity on every evaluation set in the low (constant) rate regime.

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