  CRC codes have long since been adopted in a vast range of applications. The
established notion that they are suitable primarily for error detection can be
set aside through use of the recently proposed Guessing Random Additive Noise
Decoding (GRAND). Hard-detection (GRAND-SOS) and soft-detection (ORBGRAND)
variants can decode any short, high-rate block code, making them suitable for
error correction of CRC-coded data. When decoded with GRAND, short CRC codes
have error correction capability that is at least as good as popular codes such
as BCH codes, but with no restriction on either code length or rate.
  The state-of-the-art CA-Polar codes are concatenated CRC and Polar codes. For
error correction, we find that the CRC is a better short code than either Polar
or CA-Polar codes. Moreover, the standard CA-SCL decoder only uses the CRC for
error detection and therefore suffers severe performance degradation in short,
high rate settings when compared with the performance GRAND provides, which
uses all of the CA-Polar bits for error correction.
  Using GRAND, existing systems can be upgraded from error detection to
low-latency error correction without re-engineering the encoder, and additional
applications of CRCs can be found in IoT, Ultra-Reliable Low Latency
Communication (URLLC), and beyond. The universality of GRAND, its ready
parallelized implementation in hardware, and the good performance of CRC as
codes make their combination a viable solution for low-latency applications.
