The Merit Factor Problem for Binary Sequences

Binary sequences with small aperiodic correlations play an important role in many applications ranging from radar to modulation and testing of systems. In 1977, M. Golay introduced the merit factor as a measure of the goodness of the sequence and conjectured an upper bound for this. His conjecture is still open. In this paper we survey the known results on the Merit Factor problem and comment on the recent experimental results by R.A.Kristiansen and M. Parker and by P. Borwein,K.-K.S.Choi and J. Jedwab.

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