The covering radius of extreme binary 2-surjective codes

The covering radius of binary 2-surjective codes of maximum length is studied in the paper. It is shown that any binary 2-surjective code of M codewords and of length has covering radius if M − 1 is a power of 2, otherwise . Two different combinatorial proofs of this assertion were found by the author. The first proof, which is written in the paper, is based on an existence theorem for k-uniform hypergraphs where the degrees of its vertices are limited by a given upper bound. The second proof, which is omitted for the sake of conciseness, is based on Baranyai’s theorem on l-factorization of a complete k-uniform hypergraph.