  We introduce a novel universal soft-decision decoding algorithm for binary
block codes called ordered reliability direct error pattern testing (ORDEPT).
Our results, obtained for a variety of popular short high-rate codes,
demonstrate that ORDEPT outperforms state-of-the-art decoding algorithms of
comparable complexity such as ordered reliability bits guessing random additive
noise decoding (ORBGRAND) in terms of the decoding error probability and
latency. The improvements carry on to the iterative decoding of product codes
and convolutional product-like codes, where we present a new adaptive decoding
algorithm and demonstrate the ability of ORDEPT to efficiently find multiple
candidate codewords to produce soft output.
