Certain notorious nonlinear binary codes contain more codewords than any known linear code. These include the codes constructed by Nordstrom-Robinson (1967), Kerdock (1972), Preparata (1968), Goethals (1974), and Delsarte-Goethals (1975). It is shown here that all these codes can be very simply constructed as binary images under the Gray map of linear codes over Z/sub 4/, the integers mod 4 (although this requires a slight modification of the Preparata and Goethals codes). The construction implies that all these binary codes are distance invariant. Duality in the Z/sub 4/ domain implies that the binary images have dual weight distributions. The Kerdock and "Preparata" codes are duals over Z/sub 4/-and the Nordstrom-Robinson code is self-dual-which explains why their weight distributions are dual to each other. The Kerdock and "Preparata" codes are Z/sub 4/-analogues of first-order Reed-Muller and extended Hamming codes, respectively. All these codes are extended cyclic codes over Z/sub 4/, which greatly simplifies encoding and decoding. An algebraic hard-decision decoding algorithm is given for the "Preparata" code and a Hadamard-transform soft-decision decoding algorithm for the I(Kerdock code. Binary first- and second-order Reed-Muller codes are also linear over Z/sub 4/, but extended Hamming codes of length n/spl ges/32 and the Golay code are not. Using Z/sub 4/-linearity, a new family of distance regular graphs are constructed on the cosets of the "Preparata" code.>
Hammons et al. (1994) studied this question.