Python Math: Calculate the Hamming distance between two given values

Last update on December 21 2024 07:35:07 (UTC/GMT +8 hours)

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.

Write a Python program to calculate the Hamming distance between two given values.

• Use the XOR operator (^) to find the bit difference between the two numbers.
• Use bin() to convert the result to a binary string.
• Convert the string to a list and use count() of str class to count and return the number of 1s in it.

Sample Solution:

Python Code:

def hamming_distance(x, y):
  return bin(x ^ y).count('1')
x = 2 
y = 3
print("Hamming distance between",x,"and",y,"is",hamming_distance(x, y))
x = 43 
y = 87
print("\nHamming distance between",x,"and",y,"is",hamming_distance(x, y))

Sample Output:

Hamming distance between 2 and 3 is 1

Hamming distance between 43 and 87 is 5

Flowchart:

Python Code Editor:

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