I read the whole article, and I don't understand. Coding theory is hard enough, but when it buried under layer after layer of analogy to make it more digestibl

I read the whole article, and I don't understand. Coding theory is hard enough, but when it buried under layer after layer of analogy to make it more digestible by non-mathematicians I can't see what the author is talking about. I know that it's challenging to make a field like coding theory understandable, but is it worth it? Who benefits from this article. The non-mathematician basically sees that some kind of a thing makes sending correct messages easier and that there has been a revolutionary breakthrough because of something to do with "rate", "locality", and some other kind of squares connected to squares in a graph that's not a graph or whatever. But whatever it is, its a breakthrough. Why is it a breakthrough, I'm not sure but it's amazing or something. The person with some idea of coding theory likewise doesn't get anything out of this article unless they are already familiar with the C^3 question (i.e. Is there a locally testable code with constant rate, distance, and locality). This is an area of research in coding theory and thus understood by very few readers even amongst those that have been exposed to codes as a student or computer scientist. Consider the concept of locally testable codes, this is what the research is all about. The author of the article explains it: > What if you could encode a message so that it would be obvious if it had been garbled before your recipient even read it? A book can’t be judged by its cover, but this message could. They called this property local testability, because such a message can be tested super-fast in just a few spots to ascertain its correctness. That's it. That's the definition of an LTC given in this article. I'm sure the writer in trying and likely fighting with his editor who is saying "That's too complicated, our readers think a string is used on kites and a bit is used to control a horse, so dumb it down for our readers and bring it back to me." HN readers that would like to know why the reported results are interesting or want to dive into the results can look up LTC on Wikipedia where you will learn that a LTC is: "A locally testable code is a type of error-correcting code for which it can be determined if a string is a word in that code by looking at a small (frequently constant) number of bits of the string.", see [1]. The mathematically inclined can then look to a lecture prepared by the original researchers, see [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locally_testable_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locally_testable_code [2] https://simons.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/docs/18324/iritdinurbtoct6slides.pdf https://simons.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/docs/18324/i...