Hamming distance
Noun
Meaning
Hamming distance (plural Hamming distances)
(information theory) Given two strings of equal length, the number of positions at which the corresponding symbols differ; it therefore indicates the minimum number of substitutions required to change one string into the other.
Examples
Extended Hamming codes achieve a Hamming distance of four, which allows the decoder to distinguish between when at most one one-bit error occurs and when any two-bit errors occur.
Free distance and error distribution The free distance (d) is the minimal Hamming distance between different encoded sequences.
The BCH code with and higher has generator polynomial This code has minimal Hamming distance 15 and corrects 7 errors.
The BCH code with has generator polynomial It has minimal Hamming distance at least 5 and corrects up to two errors.
Like BRGCs, each consists of a lists of words, where each word differs from the next in only one digit (each word has a Hamming distance of 1 from the next word).
Since most such codes correct only bit-flips, but not bit-insertions or bit-deletions, the Hamming distance metric is the appropriate way to measure the number of bit errors.