Abstract:

There is a hearsay telling that full rank perfect codes act like prime elements in the family of perfect codes. The truth value of this rumor will be discussed on the basis of the paper "Tilings of binary spaces" in SIAM J. Discrete Math., 9 (1996), 393-412, by G. Cohen, S. Litsyn, A. Vardy and G. Zémor. Everything will be very simple and almost everything will be explained.