Tutorial on algebraic deletion correction codes

Abstract: The deletion channel is known to be a notoriously diffcult channel to design error-correction codes for. In spite of this difficulty, there are some beautiful code constructions which give some intuition about the channel and about what good deletion codes look like. In this tutorial we will take a look at some of them. This document is a transcript of my talk at the coding theory reading group on some interesting works on deletion channel. It is not intended to be an exhaustive survey of works on deletion channel, but more as a tutorial to some of the important and cute ideas in this area. For a comprehensive survey, we refer the reader to the cited sources and surveys. We also provide an implementation of VT codes that correct single insertion/deletion errors for general alphabets at https://github.com/shubhamchandak94/VT_codes/.