Unfortunately, the Reed-Muller code has a serious drawback: The number of bits required to encode a message increases exponentially with the number of variables. If you want a highly local code that corrects errors with just a handful of queries, you’ll need a lot of variables for long messages, and the Reed-Muller code will quickly become useless in practice. “Exponential in this case is very bad,” Dvir said. But is it inevitable? Correctable or Decodable? As computer scientists tried and faile...