Hamming Code

Richard Hamming

The 1940s

Bell Laboratory

In the 1940s computers stored information in the form of punch cards, where a hole represents 1 and no hole represented 0.

Error-prone system; bent cards or punched incorrectly.

Causing system halt.

Needed to find the error and correct it manually.

This was the problem Hamming sought to solve by devising a method that would detect and correct single-bit errors automatically without interrupting calculations.

Hamming based his method on the concept of a parity bit, which is a single bit that is added to the end of a sequence indicating whether the number of 1s in a sequence is even or odd, enabling the receiver to detect whether an error has occurred.

Correcting the error entails knowing which part of the sequence is incorrect.

Hamming added more parity bits to convey information about the location of the error.

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