Symmetric block designs and optimal equidistant codes (Q2211176)

In this paper, it is shown that any symmetric block design with parameters \((v, k, \lambda)\) generates optimal ternary and quaternary constant-weight equidistant codes, whose parameters are uniquely determined by the parameters of the block design. A \(q\)-ary code is symbolwise uniform if, in the \(N \times n\) array of codewords, each nonzero symbol occurs the same number of times in each column, and this number is the same for all nonzero symbols. The paper provides constructions for certain symbolwise uniform equidistant codes of the minimum length.