Jon-Lark Kim

Junmin An, Jae-Hyun Baek, Keon-Hwi Kim et al.

This paper presents a novel construction method for symmetric Sudoku-type games based on Lee distance perfect codes and diameter perfect codes. The proposed method utilizes the tiling property of these codes to define the structure of the subgrid constraints of Sudoku-type games. In this way, our games inherit the symmetric properties of Sudoku. We provide a detailed analysis of two small cases: a $5 \times 5$ Sudoku in $\mathbb{Z}_5^2$, and an $8 \times 8$ Sudoku in $\mathbb{Z}_8^2$. By defining equivalence relations via rigid motions, we provide a complete enumeration of valid grids, identifying 17 inequivalent solutions for $5\times 5$ Sudoku. For two different types of $8\times 8$ Sudoku, we characterize 232,735 and 304,014 inequivalent solutions, respectively. Furthermore, to verify practical playability, we implement a human-like solver that assesses the difficulty of the generated games. The analysis confirms that our $5\times5$ Sudoku games offer a balanced distribution of difficulty levels, ranging from Easy to Hard, making them a viable alternative to traditional $9 \times 9$ Sudoku.

Guijin Son, Seungone Kim, Catherine Arnett et al.

Following the recent achievement of gold-medal performance on the IMO by frontier LLMs, the community is searching for the next meaningful and challenging target for measuring LLM reasoning. Whereas olympiad-style problems measure step-by-step reasoning alone, research-level problems use such reasoning to advance the frontier of mathematical knowledge itself, emerging as a compelling alternative. Yet research-level math benchmarks remain scarce because such problems are difficult to source (e.g., Riemann Bench and FrontierMath-Tier 4 contain 25 and 50 problems, respectively). To support reliable evaluation of next-generation frontier models, we introduce Soohak, a 439-problem benchmark newly authored from scratch by 64 mathematicians. Soohak comprises two subsets. On the Challenge subset, frontier models including Gemini-3-Pro, GPT-5, and Claude-Opus-4.5 reach 30.4%, 26.4%, and 10.4% respectively, leaving substantial headroom, while leading open-weight models such as Qwen3-235B, GPT-OSS-120B, and Kimi-2.5 remain below 15%. Notably, beyond standard problem solving, Soohak introduces a refusal subset that probes a capability intrinsic to research mathematics: recognizing ill-posed problems and pausing rather than producing confident but unjustified answers. On this subset, no model exceeds 50%, identifying refusal as a new optimization target that current models do not directly address. To prevent contamination, the dataset will be publicly released in late 2026, with model evaluations available upon request in the interim.

Minjia Shi, Xuan Wang, Bouazzaoui Zakariae et al.

Wall-Sun-Sun primes (shortly WSS primes) are defined as those primes $p$ such that the period of the Fibonacci recurrence is the same modulo $p$ and modulo $p^2.$ This concept has been generalized recently to certain second order recurrences whose characteristic polynomials admit as a zero the principal unit of $\mathbb{Q}(\sqrt{d}),$ for some integer $d>0.$ Primes of the latter type we call $WSS(d).$ They correspond to the case when $\mathbb{Q}(\sqrt{d})$ is not $p$-rational. For such a prime $p$ we study the weight distributions of the cyclic codes over $\mathbb{F}_p$ and $\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$ whose check polynomial is the reciprocal of the said characteristic polynomial. Some of these codes are MDS (reducible case) or NMDS (irreducible case).

Minjia Shi, Xuan Wang, Junmin An et al.

We study linear codes over Gaussian integers equipped with the Mannheim distance. We develop Mannheim-metric analogues of several classical bounds. We derive an explicit formula for the volume of Mannheim balls, which yields a sphere packing bound and constraints on the parameters of two-error-correcting perfect codes. We prove several other useful bounds, and exhibit families of codes meeting these bounds for some parameters, thereby showing that these bounds are tight. We also discuss self-dual codes over Gaussian integers and obtain upper bounds on their minimum Mannheim distance for certain parameter regions using a Mannheim version of the Macwilliams-type identity. Finally, we present decoding algorithms for codes over Gaussian integer residue rings. We give examples showing that certain errors which are not correctable under the Hamming metric become correctable under the Mannheim metric.

Jae-Hyun Baek, Jon-Lark Kim

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First we show that Kim's building-up construction of binary self-dual codes is equivalent to Chinburg-Zhang's Hilbert symbol construction. Second we introduce a $q$-ary version of Chinburg-Zhang's construction in order to construct $q$-ary self-dual codes efficiently. For the latter, we study self-dual codes over split finite fields \(\F_q\) with \(q \equiv 1 \pmod{4}\) through three complementary viewpoints: the building-up construction, the binary arithmetic reduction of Chinburg--Zhang, and the hyperbolic geometry of the Euclidean plane. The condition that \(-1\) be a square is the common algebraic input linking these viewpoints: in the binary case it underlies the Lagrangian reduction picture, while in the split \(q\)-ary case it produces the isotropic line governing the correction terms in the extension formulas. As an application of our efficient form of generator matrices, we construct optimal self-dual codes from the split boxed construction, including self-dual \([6,3,4]\) and \([8,4,4]\) codes over \(\GF{5}\), MDS self-dual \([8,4,5]\) and \([10,5,6]\) codes over \(\GF{13}\), and a self-dual \([12,6,6]\) code over \(\GF{13}\). These structural statements are accompanied by a Lean~4 formalization of the algebraic core.

Jon-Lark Kim, Young-Sik Kim, Lucky Galvez et al.

McNie is a code-based public key encryption scheme submitted as a candidate to the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography standardization. In this paper, we present McNie2-Gabidulin, an improvement of McNie. By using Gabidulin code, we eliminate the decoding failure, which is one of the limitations of the McNie public key cryptosystem that uses LRPC codes. We prove that this new cryptosystem is IND-CPA secure. Suggested parameters are also given which provides low key sizes compared to other known code based cryptosystems with zero decryption failure probability.

Jon-Lark Kim, Young-Sik Kim, Lucky Galvez et al.

In this paper, we suggest a code-based public key encryption scheme, called McNie. McNie is a hybrid version of the McEliece and Niederreiter cryptosystems and its security is reduced to the hard problem of syndrome decoding. The public key involves a random generator matrix which is also used to mask the code used in the secret key. This makes the system safer against known structural attacks. In particular, we apply rank-metric codes to McNie.