Cavity approach to the Sourlas code system

TL;DR

This paper applies the cavity method to analyze the statistical physics of Sourlas codes, improving understanding of their decoding performance and phase transitions, especially at zero temperature, with implications for code design.

Contribution

It introduces a cavity approach that considers ground-state entropy and improves decoding analysis of Sourlas codes, extending to irregular codes and potential replica-symmetry-breaking.

Findings

Cavity method recovers Shannon's bound at zero temperature for infinite-body interactions.

Decoding performance is enhanced by considering ground-state entropy via cavity equations.

Irregular Sourlas codes show a trade-off between dynamical properties and decoding performance.

Abstract

The statistical physics properties of regular and irregular Sourlas codes are investigated in this paper by the cavity method. At finite temperatures, the free energy density of these coding systems is derived and compared with the result obtained by the replica method. In the zero temperature limit, the Shannon's bound is recovered in the case of infinite-body interactions while the code rate is still finite. However, the decoding performance as obtained by the replica theory has not considered the zero-temperature entropic effect. The cavity approach is able to consider the ground-state entropy. It leads to a set of evanescent cavity fields propagation equations which further improve the decoding performance, as confirmed by our numerical simulations on single instances. For the irregular Sourlas code, we find that it takes the trade-off between good dynamical property and high performance of decoding. In agreement with the results found from the algorithmic point of view, the decoding exhibits a first order phase transition as occurs in the regular code system with three-body interactions. The cavity approach for the Sourlas code system can be extended to consider first-step replica-symmetry-breaking.