[Term of the Day]: Hamming Code

Term of the Day

"Hamming Code"

Definition — What is Hamming Code?

Hamming Code is an error detecting and correcting code technique that was developed in 1950 by R.W.Hamming. Whenever a data packet is transmitted over a network, there are possibilities that the data bits may get lost or damaged during transmission which may result in the loss of important data.

In a data sequence, if 1 is changed to zero or 0 is changed to 1, it is called "Bit error". In Hamming code, the redundancy bits are placed at certain calculated positions in order to eliminate errors. The distance between the two redundancy bits is called "Hamming distance".

This code not only identifies the error bit in the whole data sequence but also auto corrects it by finding the state at which the error has occurred.

Refer to this article to know more about the Hamming Code.