Z/sub 2/k-linear codes (Q4701124)

Recent results have shown that two families of codes (Kerdock codes and Delsarte Goethals codes) having parameters that compare very well to those from BCH-codes, can be described as the image of certain \(\mathbb{Z}_4\)-linear codes under the Gray map. Motivated by this the author studies some generalization of the Gray map to higher dimensions and the images of the generalizations of the above mentioned \(\mathbb{Z}_4\)-linear codes to \(\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}\). Using some estimates for exponential sums over Galois rings that were derived by Kumar, Calderbank, Sloane, Hammons and Sole, he derives lower bounds for the minimum distance for the corresponding binary codes (which he calls generalized Kerdock codes). Unfortunately the estimates for the parameters found in this way indicate that the constructed codes are not doing better than some easy to construct BCH-codes, however that would change if the estimates could be improved upon. It would be nice to study some small examples to see whether the estimates are very different from the real parameters or not. Proposition 4 contains a disturbing misprint: the vector \((0 s 0 s)\) in this proposition should have been \((0 0 s s)\). Furthermore the author uses the not commonly known term Hadamard product for the coordinatewise product of two vectors.