Making Every Edit Count: Efficient Binary Edit Correction at the Gilbert-Varshamov Bound

Abstract

We construct binary codes that attain the classical Gilbert-Varshamov redundancy guarantee for a fixed number of edit errors, with deterministic polynomial-time construction, encoding, and decoding. For every fixed integer $t\ge 1$ and all sufficiently large block lengths $n$, our codes correct any combination of at most $t$ insertions, deletions, and substitutions in total, with redundancy at most $2t\log_2 n+O_t(1)$. All algorithms run in polynomial time in $n$ for fixed $t$, and decoding recovers the original information message. This realizes the classical counting guarantee algorithmically without enumerating the exponentially large space of binary words.