I am reading about an algorithm for finding minimum-weight words in large linear codes. Let $c$ be the codeword of weight $w$ to recover (with size $n$ and in $GF(2)$). Let $N = \left\{1, 2, \ldots, n\right\}$ and $I\subset N$ ($|I| = k$). Let $\left\{X_i\right\}_{i\in N}$ be a stochastic process which corresponds to the number of nonzero bits of $c$ in $I$ and the random variable $X_i$ take its values in the set $\left\{1, 2, \ldots, w\right\}$. The state space of the stochastic process is:
$E = \left\{1, \cdots, 2p - 1\right\} \cup \left\{2p\right\} \cup \left\{2p + 1, \cdots, w\right\}$
where
$X_i = u$ iff $|I\cap \textrm{supp}(c)| = u$, $\forall u \in \left\{1, \cdots, 2p-1\right\} \cup \left\{2p + 1, \cdots, w\right\}.$
My questions are: Why the initial probabilty vector is $\pi_0(u)=\dfrac{C^{w}_u C^{n-w}_{k-u}}{C^{n}_k}$, if $u \notin \left\{{2p}\right\}$. And the most important: How to interpret these combinatorials?.
Definition: $\textrm{supp}(c)$ is a set with coordinates of nonzero bits in $c$.