On the code generated by the incidence matrix of points and \(k\)-spaces in \(\text{PG}(n,q)\) and its dual (Q958614)

A linear code spanned by the blockpoint incidence matrix of a block design has been a matter of considerable interest for the past several decades. Given a design \(\mathbf D\), take the block-point incidence matrex (this is transpose of the incidence matrix that one generally looks at) and construct a linear span of all the row vectors over a suitable field. The main questions here are the dimension, weight distribution, the structure of words of small weights and the dual of such a code. The authors continue their study of codes \(C_k(n, q)\) of designs obtained from a projective space \(\text{PG}(n, q)\) with \(k\)-dimensional subspaces as blocks. If we let \(q = p^h, h \geq 2\) and \(p\) a prime, then the more difficult case is that of a \(p\)-ary code \(C_k(n, q)\) which is what the authors consider. When \(k \geq \frac{n}{2}\), the authors link codewords in \(C_k(n, q) \;{C_k(n, q)}^{\perp}\) that have weight smaller than \(2q^k\) to \(k\)-blocking sets. The paper extends several earlier known results that considered the special case \(k = n - 1\), which is the point-hyperplane symmetric design of a projective space.