Quasi-symmetric 2-(31, 7, 7) designs and a revision of Hamada's conjecture

AbstractIt is proved by use of the classification of the doubly even (32, 16) codes, that in addition to the design formed by the planes in PG(4, 2), there are exactly four other nonisomorphic quasi-symmetric 2-(31, 7, 7) designs, and they all have 2-rank 16. This shows that the “only if” part of the following conjecture due to Hamada, is not true in general: “If N(D) is an incidence matrix of a design D with the parameters of a design G defined by the flats of a given dimension in PG(t, q) or AG(t, q), then rankq N(D) ⩾ rankq N(G), with equality if and only if D is isomorphic with G.” The five quasi-symmetric 2-(31, 7, 7) designs are extendable to nonisomorphic 3-(32, 8, 7) designs having 2-rank 16, one of which is formed by the 3-flats in AG(5, 2), thus the designs arising from a finite affine geometry also are not characterized by their ranks in general. A quasi-symmetric 2-(45, 9, 8) design yielding a pseudo-geometric strongly regular graph with parameters (r, k, t) = (15, 10, 6) is also constructed on the base of the known extremal doubly even (48, 24) code