Ball codes: A coding characterization of Hausdorff and packing dimensions

Abstract

We prove a purely classical, coding-theoretic characterization of Hausdorff and packing dimensions in \(\mathbb R^n\). A \emph{ball code} assigns names to closed balls of \(\mathbb R^n\): it is a partial map from a prefix-free set of finite binary strings to balls. For every nonempty \(E\subseteq\mathbb R^n\), the Hausdorff dimension of \(E\) is the minimum, over all ball codes, of the supremum over \(x\in E\) of the lower asymptotic rate at which \(x\) can be described by names of balls containing it; the packing dimension is obtained in the same way from the upper rates. The Hausdorff characterization is a Euclidean counterpart of Ryabko's coding theorem for combinatorial sources. We obtain the packing characterization from the standard characterization of packing dimension by upper modified box-counting dimension, without encoding \(\mathbb R^n\) into a sequence space. We then derive the point-to-set principle of J.~Lutz and N.~Lutz by replacing a minimizing ball code with a rational one and storing the resulting countable codebook in an oracle.