Hamming Distance

Problem Description

The Hamming distance between two integers is the number of positions at which the corresponding bits are different. Given two integers x and y, return the Hamming distance between them.

Key Insights

• The Hamming distance can be found by performing a bitwise XOR operation between the two integers.
• The result of the XOR operation will have bits set to 1 at positions where the two integers differ.
• To count the number of differing bits, we can count the number of 1s in the binary representation of the XOR result.

Space and Time Complexity

Time Complexity: O(1) - The operations involved (XOR and counting bits) take constant time. Space Complexity: O(1) - We use a constant amount of space for variables.

Solution

To solve the problem, we use the following steps:

1. Perform a bitwise XOR operation on the two integers x and y. This will yield a new integer where each bit is set to 1 if the corresponding bits of x and y are different.
2. Count the number of 1s in the resulting integer. This can be done using a loop that checks each bit or by utilizing built-in functions in various programming languages.

Code Solutions