On: Reed-Solomon error-correcting code decoder

[mkeeter]

Another example of Reed-Solomon codes in the wild: RS codes are used in QR codes because they're particularly resistant to localized errors, e.g. a physically-contiguous section of the code becoming damaged or unreadable.

[userbinator → mkeeter]

physically-contiguous section of the code becoming damaged or unreadable.

This is because they operate on multi-bit symbols. To the algorithm, one bad bit in a symbol is no worse than all bad bits.

There's a lot more info on that here:

https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Reed%E2%80%93Solomon_codes_f...

[nayuki → mkeeter]

I was motivated to learn Reed-Solomon decoding precisely because it was the only technical aspect of QR Code decoding that I couldn't implement from scratch!