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Concept
Hamming weight
Summary
The Hamming weight of a string is the number of symbols that are different from the zero-symbol of the alphabet used. It is thus equivalent to the Hamming distance from the all-zero string of the same length. For the most typical case, a string of bits, this is the number of 1's in the string, or the digit sum of the binary representation of a given number and the l1 norm of a bit vector. In this binary case, it is also called the population count, popcount, sideways sum, or bit summation.
The Hamming weight is named after Richard Hamming although he did not originate the notion. The Hamming weight of binary numbers was already used in 1899 by James W. L. Glaisher to give a formula for the number of odd binomial coefficients in a single row of Pascal's triangle. Irving S. Reed introduced a concept, equivalent to Hamming weight in the binary case, in 1954.
Hamming weight is used in several disciplines including information theory, coding theory, and cryptography. Examples of applications of the Hamming weight include:
In modular exponentiation by squaring, the number of modular multiplications required for an exponent e is log2 e + weight(e). This is the reason that the public key value e used in RSA is typically chosen to be a number of low Hamming weight.
The Hamming weight determines path lengths between nodes in Chord distributed hash tables.
IrisCode lookups in biometric databases are typically implemented by calculating the Hamming distance to each stored record.
In computer chess programs using a bitboard representation, the Hamming weight of a bitboard gives the number of pieces of a given type remaining in the game, or the number of squares of the board controlled by one player's pieces, and is therefore an important contributing term to the value of a position.
Hamming weight can be used to efficiently compute find first set using the identity ffs(x) = pop(x ^ (x - 1)). This is useful on platforms such as SPARC that have hardware Hamming weight instructions but no hardware find first set instruction.
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