The purpose of this paper is to show that decoding complexity need not grow exponentially with the code block length at rates close to channel capacity and also to show the expediency of the approach of imbedding codes in each other. It is demonstrated that it is possible to communicate over a memoryless channel of capacity

at any rate

with a probability of error of less than

, per block of a length approximately proportional to

and with a computational decoding complexity per digit which is asymptotically proportional to

when

is large,

being finite for

.

.