Perfect codes in weakly metric association schemes
For coding theorists, this provides a unified framework and new impossibility results for perfect codes in multiple distance metrics.
The paper proves non-existence results for perfect codes in several metrics (Lee, NRT, mixed Hamming, sum-rank) by combining the Lloyd Theorem with the Schwartz-Zippel Lemma and asymptotic enumeration of integer partitions, introducing the concept of polynomial weakly metric association schemes.
The Lloyd Theorem of (Solé, 1989) is combined with the Schwartz-Zippel Lemma of theoretical computer science to derive non-existence results for perfect codes in the Lee metric, NRT metric, mixed Hamming metric, and for the sum-rank distance. The proofs are based on asymptotic enumeration of integer partitions. The framework is the new concept of {\em polynomial} weakly metric association schemes. A connection between this notion and the recent theory of multivariate P-polynomial schemes of ( Bannai et al. 2025) and of $m$-distance regular graphs ( Bernard et al 2025) is pointed out.