Further Results on Survivor Error Patterns for Maximum Likelihood Decoding

Survivor error patterns for the (63,57,3) Hamming code are presented. This reduced list of error patterns enables rather efficient maximum likelihood soft decision decoding of the Hamming code and large turbo-like codes whose constituents are the aforementioned Hamming codes. The list of survivor error patterns for the (63,57,3) Hamming code possesses certain properties unshared by the lists of survivors for smaller Hamming codes. Also, we demonstrate that the weight distribution is a powerful means in specifying survivor error patterns for codes other than Hamming codes.