Tiling Hamming space with few spheres (Q1374207)

A binary generalized perfect code is a partition of \(\mathbb F^n_2\) into \(M\) spheres (or better: balls) with possibly different radii. It is shown that for such a partition, either \(M\leq 2\) (trivial cases) or \(M\geq n+2\). If \(M=n+2\), then one of the spheres has radius \(n-2\) and all others consist of one point. The proof depends on the well-known De Bruijn-Erdös theorem on the number of lines in a linear space.