The Monday Morning Problem: Error-Correcting Codes

Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp · Oct 28, 2026 · 1h 2m

In 2003 a Belgian candidate received exactly 4,096 impossible votes: one flipped bit. Episode one hundred and ninety one explains why such errors are rare, through the mathematics that protects nearly every bit you use: Shannon's limit, Hamming's codes, Reed–Solomon codes in CDs and QR codes, the Viterbi algorithm, the turbo-code shock of 1993, the rediscovered LDPC codes, polar codes and the 5G code war, flash memory, Rowhammer and quantum error correction. Mariam and her lunar relay are fictional; everything else is sourced in the fact-check log. Builds on the information theory, radio and…