It is shown that the number

of binary-valued

-tuples having fractional weight

or less,

, such that no two

-tuples agree in any

consecutive positions, is bounded by

. A set of

-tuples is constructed to show that this bound is not likely to be improved upon by any significant factor. This bound is used to show that the ratio

of definite-decoding minimum distance to definite-decoding constraint length is lower bounded by
![H^{-l}[frac{1}{6} \\cdot (1 - R)/ (1+R)]](/images/tex/7654.gif)
as

grows without bound.