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. In this binary case, it is also called the population count, popcount, or sideways sum. It is the digit sum of the binary representation of a given number and the ℓ₁ norm of a bit vector.

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 J. 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:

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