Randomly punctured Reed–Solomon codes achieve list-decoding capacity over linear-sized fields

Reed–Solomon codes are a classic family of error-correcting codes consisting of evaluations of low-degree polynomials over a finite field on some sequence of distinct field elements. They are widely known for their optimal unique-decoding capabilities, but their list-decoding capabilities are not fully understood. Given the prevalence of Reed-Solomon codes, a fundamental question in coding theory is determining if Reed–Solomon codes can optimally achieve list-decoding capacity. A recent breakthrough by Brakensiek, Gopi, and Makam, established that Reed–Solomon codes are combinatorially list-decodable all the way to capacity. However, their results hold for randomly-punctured Reed–Solomon codes over an exponentially large field size 2^O(n), where n is the block length of the code. A natural question is whether Reed–Solomon codes can still achieve capacity over smaller fields. Recently, Guo and Zhang showed that Reed–Solomon codes are list-decodable to capacity with field size O(n^2). We show that Reed–Solomon codes are list-decodable to capacity with linear field size O(n), which is optimal up to the constant factor. We also give evidence that the ratio between the alphabet size q and code length n cannot be bounded by an absolute constant. Our techniques also show that random linear codes are list-decodable up to (the alphabet-independent) capacity with optimal list-size O(1/ε) and near-optimal alphabet size 2^O(1/ε^2), where ε is the gap to capacity. As far as we are aware, list-decoding up to capacity with optimal list-size O(1/ε) was previously not known to be achievable with any linear code over a constant alphabet size (even non-constructively). Our proofs are based on the ideas of Guo and Zhang, and we additionally exploit symmetries of reduced intersection matrices.