Hamming distance [SEP] named after
History and applications.
The Hamming distance is named after Richard Hamming, who introduced the concept in his fundamental paper on Hamming codes "Error detecting and error correcting codes" in 1950. Hamming weight analysis of bits is used in several disciplines including information theory, coding theory, and cryptography.
It is used in telecommunication to count the number of flipped bits in a fixed-length binary word as an estimate of error, and therefore is sometimes called the signal distance. For "q"-ary strings over an alphabet of
Hamming distance
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