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Concept
Hamming distance
Summary
In information theory, the Hamming distance between two strings of equal length is the number of positions at which the corresponding symbols are different. In other words, it measures the minimum number of substitutions required to change one string into the other, or the minimum number of errors that could have transformed one string into the other. In a more general context, the Hamming distance is one of several string metrics for measuring the edit distance between two sequences. It is named after the American mathematician Richard Hamming.
A major application is in coding theory, more specifically to block codes, in which the equal-length strings are vectors over a finite field.
The Hamming distance between two equal-length strings of symbols is the number of positions at which the corresponding symbols are different.
The symbols may be letters, bits, or decimal digits, among other possibilities. For example, the Hamming distance between:
"kain" and "kain" is 3.
"krin" and "krin" is 3.
"kin" and "kin" is 4.
and is 4.
2396 and 2396 is 3.
For a fixed length n, the Hamming distance is a metric on the set of the words of length n (also known as a Hamming space), as it fulfills the conditions of non-negativity, symmetry, the Hamming distance of two words is 0 if and only if the two words are identical, and it satisfies the triangle inequality as well: Indeed, if we fix three words a, b and c, then whenever there is a difference between the ith letter of a and the ith letter of c, then there must be a difference between the ith letter of a and ith letter of b, or between the ith letter of b and the ith letter of c. Hence the Hamming distance between a and c is not larger than the sum of the Hamming distances between a and b and between b and c. The Hamming distance between two words a and b can also be seen as the Hamming weight of a − b for an appropriate choice of the − operator, much as the difference between two integers can be seen as a distance from zero on the number line.
Official source
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