Parity codes
Motivated by a problem posed by Hamming in 1980, we define even codes. They are Huffman type prefix codes with the additional property of being able to detect the occurrence of an odd number of 1-bit errors in the message. We characterize optimal even codes and describe a simple method for constructing the optimal codes. Further, we compare optimal even codes with Huffman codes for equal frequencies. We show that the maximum encoding in an optimal even code is at most two bits larger than the maximum...