On a conjecture concerning coverings of Hamming space.

We provide evidence for the following conjecture: a minimal covering of the binary Hamming space F(n)(2)(+2) by spheres of radius t + 1 has at most the same cardinality as a minimal covering of F(n)(2) by spheres of radius t. (To appear in Proceedings Conf. on Applied Algebra and Error-Correcting Codes, Toulouse, 1985. A more detailed treatment can be found in 11218-851111-42TM and 11218-851111-44TM.)