  This contribution is based on the contents of a talk delivered at the
Next-SigmaPhi conference held in Crete in August 2005. It is adressed to an
audience of physicists with diverse horizons and does not assume any background
in communications theory. Capacity approaching error correcting codes for
channel communication known as Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes have
attracted considerable attention from coding theorists in the last decade.
Surprisingly strong connections with the theory of diluted spin glasses have
been discovered. In this work we elucidate one new connection, namely that a
class of correlation inequalities valid for gaussian spin glasses can be
applied to the theoretical analysis of LDPC codes. This allows for a rigorous
comparison between the so called (optimal) maximum a posteriori and the
computationaly efficient belief propagation decoders. The main ideas of the
proofs are explained and we refer to recent works for the more lengthy
technical details.
