Reductions between problems, the mainstay of theoretical computer science, efficiently map an instance of one problem to an instance of another in such a way that solving the latter allows solving the former. The subject of this work is ``lossy'' reductions, where the reduction loses some information about the input ... more >>>

We show that assuming the strong exponential-time hypothesis (SETH), there are no non-trivial algorithms for the nearest codeword problem (NCP), the minimum distance problem (MDP), or the nearest codeword problem with preprocessing (NCPP) on linear codes over any finite field. More precisely, we show that there are no NCP, MDP, ... more >>>