The design of binary error-correcting codes is a challenging optimization problem with several applications in telecommunications and storage, which has also been addressed with metaheuristic techniques and evolutionary algorithms. Still, all these efforts focused on optimizing the minimum distance of unrestricted binary codes, i.e., with no constraints on their linearity, which is a desirable property for efficient implementations. In this paper, we present an Evolutionary Strategy (ES) algorithm that explores only the subset of linear codes of a fixed length and dimension. To that end, we represent the candidate solutions as binary matrices and devise variation operators that preserve their ranks. Our experiments show that up to length n = 14, our ES always converges to an optimal solution with a full success rate, and the evolved codes are all inequivalent to the Best-Known Linear Code (BKLC) given by MAGMA. On the other hand, for larger lengths, both the success rate of the ES, as well as the diversity of the evolved codes, start to drop, with the extreme case of (16, 8, 5) codes which all turn out to be equivalent to MAGMA’s BKLC.
