Comments on "An inequality on guessing and its application to sequential decoding"

In the above paper by E. Arikan (see ibid., vol.42, no.1, p.99-105, 1996) an asymptotically tight upper bound on the /spl rho/th moment (/spl rho//spl ges/0) of the minimal number of guesses required to determine the value of a random variable was derived. We show that we can tighten this bound for the case of positive integer moments (when /spl rho/=1, the bound is improved by a factor of 2) and that the new bound also applies to a class of nonminimal guessing sequences.