The complexity of information set decoding

Information set decoding is an algorithm for decoding any linear code. Expressions for the complexity of the procedure that are logarithmically exact for virtually all codes are presented. The expressions cover the cases of complete minimum distance decoding and bounded hard-decision decoding, as well as the important case of bounded soft-decision decoding. It is demonstrated that these results are vastly better than those for the trivial algorithms of searching through all codewords or through all syndromes, and are significantly better than those for any other general algorithm currently known. For codes over large symbol fields, the procedure tends towards a complexity that is subexponential in the symbol size