A Brief Survey of Self-Dual Codes

This report is a survey of self-dual binary codes. We present the fundamental MacWilliams identity and Gleason’s theorem on self-dual binary codes. We also examine the upper bound of minimum weights of self-dual binary codes using the extremal weight enumerator formula. We describe the shadow code of a self-dual code and the restrictions of the weight enumerator of the shadow code. Then using the restrictions, we calculate the weight enumerators of self-dual codes of length 38 and 40 and we obtain the known weight enumerators of this lengths. Finally, we investigate the Gaborit-Otmani experimental construction of selfdual binary codes. This construction involves a fixed orthogonal matrix, and we compare the result to the results obtained using other orthogonal matrices.