Non-commutative error correcting codes and proper subgroup testing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel approach to property testing in group theory, establishing the existence of small test subsets that can distinguish between entire groups and proper subgroups, generalizing classical error correcting codes.

Contribution

It proves the existence of small test subsets in non-commutative groups for subgroup detection, extending error correcting code concepts to group theory.

Findings

Existence of linear-sized test subsets in general groups

Construction of test subsets for abelian, nilpotent, and solvable groups

Implications for universal error correcting codes and future research directions

Abstract

Property testing has been a major area of research in computer science in the last three decades. By property testing we refer to an ensemble of problems, results and algorithms which enable to deduce global information about some data by only reading small random parts of it. In recent years, this theory found its way into group theory, mainly via group stability. In this paper, we study the following problem: Devise a randomized algorithm that given a subgroup $H$ of $G$, decides whether $H$ is the whole group or a proper subgroup, by checking whether a single (random) element of $G$ is in $H$. The search for such an algorithm boils down to the following purely group theoretic problem: For $G$ of rank $k$, find a small as possible test subset $A\subseteq G$ such that for every proper subgroup $H$, $|H\cap A|\leq (1-\delta)|A|$ for some absolute constant $\delta>0$, which we call the detection probability of $A$. It turns out that the search for sets $A$ of size linear in $k$ and constant detection probability is a non-commutative analogue of the classical search for families of good error correcting codes. This paper is devoted to proving that such test subsets exist, which implies good universal error correcting codes exist -- providing a far reaching generalization of the classical result of Shannon. In addition, we study this problem in certain subclasses of groups -- such as abelian, nilpotent, and finite solvable groups -- providing different constructions of test subsets for these subclasses with various qualities. Finally, this generalized theory of non-commutative error correcting codes suggests a plethora of interesting problems and research directions.