Binary Polar Codes are Optimized Codes for Bitwise Multistage Decoding

Polar codes are considered the latest major breakthrough in coding theory. Polar codes were introduced by Ar{\i}kan in 2008. In this letter, we show that the binary polar codes are the same as the optimized codes for bitwise multistage decoding (OCBM), which have been discovered before by Stolte in 2002. The equivalence between the techniques used for the constructions and decodings of both codes is established.