Mondo Knows Facts
Hamming codes find and fix a single bad bit
Richard Hamming's 1950 scheme adds overlapping parity bits so a receiver can locate one flipped bit and repair it Hamming was frustrated that a machine at Bell Labs halted whenever a relay error spoiled a punched card run. His code spreads parity checks across several groups of bits, so the pattern of failures points to the guilty position. A version with an extra overall parity bit also distinguishes one error from two, and the idea is still standard in memory and communications. It sits in Mondo's technology collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Tags: error-correction, computing-history, coding-theory
Hamming codes find and fix a single bad bit: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Richard Hamming's 1950 scheme adds overlapping parity bits so a receiver can locate one flipped bit and repair it. The figure is taken from Britannica, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a technology fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.