We discuss the high density behavior of a system of hard spheres of diameter d on the hypercubic lattice of dimension n, in the limit n → ∞, d → ∞, d/n = δ. The problem is relevant for coding theory, and the best available bounds state that the maximum density of the system falls in the interval 1 ≤ ρV d ≤ exp(nκ(δ)), being κ(δ) > 0 and V d the volume of a sphere of radius d. We find a solution of the equations describing the liquid up to an exponentially large value of ρ = ρV d , but we show that this solution gives a negative entropy for the liquid phase for ρ > ∼ n. We then conjecture that a phase transition towards a different phase might take place, and we discuss possible scenarios for this transition.A code C is a subset of the binary Hamming space H n 2 = {0, 1} n . The distance between two points s, t ∈ H n 2 is the Hamming distance d(s, t) = n α=1 (s α + t α ) mod2 , i.e. it is given by the number of different bits. We consider the problem of finding the maximal size A(n, d) of a code C such that the minimum distance between two points in C is d, that means, denoting by |C| the number of sequences in C,( 1) In particular we are interested in the quantitywhere the supremum is taken on all possible sequences of codes such that d/n → δ. The problem trivializes for δ > 1/2 as the total number of sequences is finite and R(δ) = 0. An interesting scaling is d/n = 1/2 − εn −α , as for an appropriate choice of α the number A(n, d) might increase polynomially in n, but this will not be investigated here. Thus we will restrict to δ < 1/2 in the following. This problem is relevant for the theory of error correcting codes [1][2][3][4][5][6]. In "physics language", it is the problem of finding the maximum possible density of a system of hard spheres on the hypercubic lattice. This rephrasing of the problem has been shown to be useful as it allows to use well known methods borrowed from the theory of liquids, like the virial expansion [4].In this paper we will discuss the behavior of the system at high density, in order to understand how one can try to compute the maximum density. We will show that, for large n, the problem closely resembles the problem of hard spheres in R n in the limit of large space dimension n. The basic idea is that in this limit the number of neighbors of a sphere is large, much as it happens in the continuum for large space dimension. We will then discuss some recent ideas that have been used in the continuum [7][8][9][10] to make some progress in the direction of deriving bounds on A(n, d).The best known lower bound on A(n, d) (Varshamov-Gilbert bound) states that the density ρ = |C|/2 n ≥ 1/V d−1 , V d being the volume of a sphere of radius d in H n 2 [1]. This bound can be proven from the convergence of the virial series [4] and gives R(δ) ≥ R V G (δ) = 1 − H(δ), H(δ) being the binary entropy function (see below). This means that a "liquid phase", defined by the virial equation of state, exists at least up to ρV d−1 ∼ 1. We will show that the liquid phase can be formally continued up to a ...