The covering radius of extreme binary 2-surjective codes

The covering radius of binary 2-surjective codes of maximum length is studied in the paper. It is shown that any binary 2-surjective code of M codewords and of length \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$n = {M-1 \choose \left\lfloor(M-2)/2\right\rfloor}$$\end{document} has covering radius \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\frac{n}{2} - 1$$\end{document} if M − 1 is a power of 2, otherwise \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\left\lfloor\frac{n}{2}\right\rfloor$$\end{document} . Two different combinatorial proofs of this assertion were found by the author. The first proof, which is written in the paper, is based on an existence theorem for k-uniform hypergraphs where the degrees of its vertices are limited by a given upper bound. The second proof, which is omitted for the sake of conciseness, is based on Baranyai’s theorem on l-factorization of a complete k-uniform hypergraph.