Blocking sets, minimal codes and trifferent codes

TL;DR

This paper establishes new bounds on affine blocking sets and minimal codes, and applies these results to improve bounds on trifferent codes over finite fields, with implications for coding theory and combinatorics.

Contribution

It introduces new bounds on affine blocking sets and minimal codes, and links these to trifferent codes, providing improved upper and lower bounds and explicit constructions.

Findings

Improved upper bounds on strong blocking sets in finite projective spaces.

Enhanced lower bounds on strong blocking sets using coding theory.

Constructed explicit affine blocking sets and linear trifferent codes with larger sizes.

Abstract

We prove new upper bounds on the smallest size of affine blocking sets, that is, sets of points in a finite affine space that intersect every affine subspace of a fixed codimension. We show an equivalence between affine blocking sets with respect to codimension-$2$ subspaces that are generated by taking a union of lines through the origin, and strong blocking sets in the corresponding projective space, which in turn are equivalent to minimal codes. Using this equivalence, we improve the current best upper bounds on the smallest size of a strong blocking set in finite projective spaces over fields of size at least $3$. Furthermore, using coding theoretic techniques, we improve the current best lower bounds on strong blocking set. Our main motivation for these new bounds is their application to trifferent codes, which are sets of ternary codes of length $n$ with the property that for any three distinct codewords there is a coordinate where they all have distinct values. Over the finite field $\mathbb{F}_3$, we prove that minimal codes are equivalent to linear trifferent codes. Using this equivalence, we show that any linear trifferent code of length $n$ has size at most $3^{n/4.55}$, improving the recent upper bound of Pohoata and Zakharov. Moreover, we show the existence of linear trifferent codes of length $n$ and size at least $\frac{1}{3}\left( 9/5 \right)^{n/4}$, thus (asymptotically) matching the best lower bound on trifferent codes. We also give explicit constructions of affine blocking sets with respect to codimension-$2$ subspaces that are a constant factor bigger than the best known lower bound. By restricting to~$\mathbb{F}_3$, we obtain linear trifferent codes of size at least $3^{23n/312}$, improving the current best explicit construction that has size $3^{n/112}$.