Hamming weight

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 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: The population count of a bitstring is often needed in cryptography and other applications. The Hamming distance of two words A and B can be calculated as the Hamming weight of A xor B. The problem of how to implement it efficiently has been widely studied. Some processors have a single command to calculate it (see below), and some have parallel operations on bit vectors. For processors lacking those features, the best solutions known are based on adding counts in a tree pattern. For example, to count the number of 1 bits in the 16-bit binary number a = 0110 1100 1011 1010, these operations can be done: Here, the operations are as in C programming language, so X >> Y means to shift X right by Y bits, X & Y means the bitwise AND of X and Y, and + is ordinary addition. The best algorithms known for this problem are based on the concept illustrated above and are given here: The above implementations have the best worst-case behavior of any known algorithm. However, when a value is expected to have few nonzero bits, it may instead be more efficient to use algorithms that count these bits one at a time. As Wegner (1960) described, the bitwise and of x with x − 1 differs from x only in zeroing out the least significant nonzero bit: subtracting 1 changes the rightmost string of 0s to 1s, and changes the rightmost 1 to a 0. If x originally had n bits that were 1, then after only n iterations of this operation, x will be reduced to zero. The following implementation is based on this principle.