Volume 32, Issue 3

The paper is concerned with sources of faults associated with commutative principal ideal rings. Tables of faults of such sources are known to correspond to Cayley multiplication tables in rings, whose elements are replaced by the values of a Boolean function of these elements. For such rings, the concepts of a diagnostic test and the Shannon function for the length of a diagnostic test are introduced in a natural way. It is shown that if A is a principal ideal ring with only one prime ideal p ≠ A , and if p n = 0 for some n ∈ ℕ, then, for this ring, the Shannon length function of a diagnostic test has the form L diagn ( A , n ) = Θ ( n ). We also define an easily testable functions, i.e., a function with respect to which the order of growth of the length of a diagnostic test with respect to this function is equal to the logarithm of the number of pairwise distinct columns of the table of faults. A link between easily testable functions and column separation of tables of faults for two concrete sources of faults is established.

A hypergraph H = ( V , E ) has the property B k if there exists an assignment of two colors to V such that each edge contains at least k vertices of each color. A hypergraph is called simple if every two edges of it have at most one common vertex. We obtain a new lower bound for the minimal number of edges of n -uniform simple hypergraph without the property B k .

Let G be the extension of a general affine group by the group of affine functions. We study the action of G on the set of Boolean functions. The action consists in nondegenerate affine transformations of variables and addition of affine Boolean functions. We introduce and examine some parameters of Boolean functions which are invariant with respect to the action of G . These are the amplitude (which is closely related to the nonlinearity), the dimension of a function, and some others. The invariants, together with some additionally proposed notions, could be used to obtain new bounds on cryptographic parameters of Boolean functions, including the maximum nonlinearity of functions in an odd number of variables.

In the present paper, we consider random variables with the power series distribution which is often used in the study of the generalized allocation scheme. We establish some asymptotic properties which include law of large numbers, moderate deviation principle, almost sure central limit theorem and the rate of convergence in the local limit theorem. These results supplements results obtained by A. V. Kolchin.

In 1988, Friese et al. put forward lower estimates for the lengths of shortest nonzero vectors for “almost all” lattices of some families in the dimension 3. In 2004, the author of the present paper obtained a similar result for the dimension 4. Here we give a better estimate for the cardinality of the set of exceptional lattices for which the above estimates are not valid. In the case of dimension 4 we improve the upper estimate for an arbitrary chosen parameter that controls the accuracy of these lower estimates and for the number of exceptions. In this (first) part of the paper, we also prove some auxiliary results, which will be used in the second (main) part of the paper, in which an analogue of A. Friese et al. result will be given for dimension 5.