2009/09/17 by E. Rodney Canfield, Zhicheng Gao, Canfield, E. Rodney +7
Computer Science · Engineering · Mathematics · #05A16 #Advanced Combinatorial Mathematics #Coding theory and cryptography #Combinatorics (math.CO) #FOS: Mathematics #graph theory and CDMA systems
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0909.3321
openalex publication_date 2009/09/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
A boolean function of n boolean variables is correlation-immune of order k if the function value is uncorrelated with the values of any k of the arguments. Such functions are of considerable interest due to their cryptographic properties, and are also related to the orthogonal arrays of statistics and the balanced hypercube colourings of combinatorics. The weight of a boolean function is the number of argument values that produce a function value of 1. If this is exactly half the argument values, that is, 2n-1 values, a correlation-immune function is called resilient. An asymptotic estimate of the number N(n,k) of n-variable correlation-immune boolean functions of order k was obtained in 1992 by Denisov for constant k. Denisov repudiated that estimate in 2000, but we will show that the repudiation was a mistake. The main contribution of this paper is an asymptotic estimate of N(n,k) which holds if k increases with n within generous limits and specialises to functions with a given weight, including the resilient functions. In the case of k=1, our estimates are valid for all weights.