English

Query Matrices for Retrieving Binary Vectors Based on the Hamming Distance Oracle

Discrete Mathematics 2012-02-14 v1 Information Retrieval Information Theory math.IT

Abstract

The Hamming oracle returns the Hamming distance between an unknown binary nn-vector xx and a binary query nn-vector y. The objective is to determine xx uniquely using a sequence of mm queries. What are the minimum number of queries required in the worst case? We consider the query ratio m/nm/n to be our figure of merit and derive upper bounds on the query ratio by explicitly constructing (m,n)(m,n) query matrices. We show that our recursive and algebraic construction results in query ratios arbitrarily close to zero. Our construction is based on codes of constant weight. A decoding algorithm for recovering the unknown binary vector is also described.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1202.2794,
  title  = {Query Matrices for Retrieving Binary Vectors Based on the Hamming Distance Oracle},
  author = {Vinay Anant Vaishampayan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1202.2794},
  year   = {2012}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-21T20:18:43.627Z