Error locating codes were first presented in 1963 by J.K. Wolf and B.Elspas. Since then several code design methods have been proposed. However, their algebraic structure has not yet been clarified. It is apparent that necessary and sufficient conditions for error correcting/detecting codes can be expressed by Hamming distance, but, on the other hand, those for error locating codes cannot always be expressed only by Hamming distance. This paper presents necessary and sufficient conditions for error locating codes by using a newly defined metric and a function. The function represents the number of bytes where Hamming distance between corresponding bytes of two codewords has a certain integer range. These conditions show that an error locating code having special code parameters is an error correcting/detecting code. This concludes that error locating codes include existing bit/byte error correcting/detecting codes in their special cases.

This letter points out that while a class of conditions presented in Matsuoka K. [1] are truly sufficient for absolute stability of neural networks, the proof of the sufficiency given in [1] is not sound. As a remark, a mathematically rigorous proof of the sufficiency of the class of conditions for absolute stability of neural networks is provided.