Ternary covering codes derived from BCH codes (Q1374190)

The covering radius \(R\) of a code \(C\subset \mathbb F^n_q\) is the smallest integer such that every element in \(\mathbb F^n_q\) is within Hamming distance \(R\) of some codeword in \(C\). The authors construct new ternary linear codes with covering radius 2 by lengthening ternary BCH codes. The first code in this series is the ternary Golay code. It is also shown how this construction of the Golay code can be used to obtain short proofs of the best known upper bounds for the football pool problem for 11 or 12 matches. The football pool problem for \(n\) matches is the problem of determining the minimum cardinality of a ternary code of length \(n\) and covering radius 1.