What is the 2's complement of -17? - digital-logic

What will be the binary value of -17 and how to find the 2's complement of -17?

Assuming an 8-bit word, start with the binary form of 17. = 00010001
Then invert the bits: = 11101110
Then just add 1: = 11101111.
If you've got a 16-, 32- or 64-bit word then you'll have a load more leading 1s.

Even if you do not assume anything, you have to just keep the leftmost bit significant.
Start with the word itself, 10001.
Then invert gives the one's, 01110
Now add 1 to this number. 01111.
But to keep the left most bit significant, append a one there eg,101111
in terms of the minimum number of bits required (6 here).

Related

Two ways to represent 0 with bits

Let's say we want to represent a signed number with 5 bits where the first bit is used for the sign (+ or -) of the number. Then the zero can be represented by two bit representations (10000 and 00000).
How is this problem solved?
Okay. There are always two bit in binary 1 or 0
And then there could be any number of bits for example 1bit to 64bit
If the question is 5-bit string then it should be XXXXX where X can be any bit(1 or 0)
First bit(sign bit) we can have either +0 and -0. (Thanks #machinery)
So if it is positive, we put 0 at first position and if it is negative, we put 1 at first position.
Four Bits
Now, we got our first bit, we are left with another 4-bits 0XXXX or 1XXXX as the question asked for 0,
the rest bit will be zero.
therefore the answer is 00000 or 10000
Look how to convert decimal to binary and binary to decimal.

Accessing individual bits in MIPS

I'm writing a program in MIPS that solves a maze using a left-hand rule algorithm. I already have my algorithm written, but I need to find a way to keep track of the spaces in the maze that I've already visited so that I can find the "best" and most direct solution to solve the maze.
In the program, register $t9 is a 32 bit number that stores information about the location of the car that traverses the maze, including column and row position, which is what I need to isolate. Basically, all I need to know is how to work with/isolate those specific bits.
Bits 31-24 is an 8-bit number representing the row in 2's compliment
Bits 23-16 is an 8-bit number representing the column in 2's compliment
tl;dr I just need to extract the first 8-bits, and the next 8-bits from a 32 bit number located in $t9 in MIPS
Thank you!
To get bits 31-24, perform a logical shift right (SRL) by 24. The remaining number will correspond to the value of those bits, as interpreted as an 8-bit integer.
To get bits 23-16, shift right by 16, then AND by 0xff.
Will you figure out the MIPS commands for that?

Fastest method for adding/summing the individual digit components of a number

I saw a question on a math forum a while back where a person was discussing adding up the digits in a number over and over again until a single digit is achieved. (i.e. "362" would become "3+6+2" which would become "11"... then "11" would become "1+1" would would become "2" therefor "362" would return 2... I wrote some nice code to get an answer to this and posted it only to be outdone by a user who suggested that any number in modulo 9 is equal to this "infinite digit sum", I checked it an he was right... well almost right, if zero was returned you had to switch it out with a "9" but that was a very quick fix...
362 = 3+6+2 = 11 = 1+1 = 2
or...
362%9 = 2
Anways, the mod9 method works fantastic for infinitely adding the sum of the digits until you are left with just a single digit... but what about only doing it once (i.e. 362 would just return "11")... Can anyone think of fast algorithms?
There's a cool trick for summing the 1 digits in binary, and with a fixed-width integer. At each iteration, you separate out half the digits each into two values, bit-shift one value down, then add. First iteration, separate ever other digit. Second iteration, pairs of digits, and so on.
Given that 27 is 00011011 as 8-bit binary, the process is...
00010001 + 00000101 = 00010110 <- every other digit step
00010010 + 00000001 = 00010011 <- pairs of digits
00000011 + 00000001 = 00000100 <- quads, giving final result 4
You could do a similar trick with decimal, but it would be less efficient than a simple loop unless you had a direct representation of decimal numbers with fast operations to zero out selected digits and to do digit-shifting. So for 12345678 you get...
02040608 + 01030507 = 03071115 <- every other digit
00070015 + 00030011 = 00100026 <- pairs
00000026 + 00000010 = 00000036 <- quads, final result
So 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8 = 36, which is correct, but you can only do this efficiently if your number representation is fixed-width decimal. It always takes lg(n) iterations, where lg means the base two logarithm, and you round upwards.
To expand on this a little (based on in-comments discussions), let's pretend this was sane, for a bit...
If you count single-digit additions, there's actually more work than a simple loop here. The idea, as with the bitwise trick for counting bits, is to re-order those additions (using associativity) and then to compute as many as possible in parallel, using a single full-width addition to implement two half-width additions, four quarter-width additions etc. There's significant overhead for the digit-clearing and digit-shifting operations, and even more if you implement this as a loop (calculating or looking up the digit-masking and shift-distance values for each step). The "loop" should probably be fully unrolled and those masks and shift-distances be included as constants in the code to avoid that.
A processor with support for Binary Coded Decimal (BCD) could handle this. Digit masking and digit shifting would be implemented using bit masking and bit shifting, as each decimal digit would be encoded in 4 (or more) bits, independent of the encoding of other digits.
One issue is that BCD support is quite rare these days. It used to be fairly common in the 8 bit and 16 bit days, but as far as I'm aware, processors that still support it now do so mainly for backward compatibility. Reasons include...
Very early processors didn't include hardware multiplication and division. Hardware support for these operations means it's easier and more efficient to convert binary to decimal now. Binary is used for almost everything now, and BCD is mostly forgotten.
There are decimal number representations around in libraries, but few if any high level languages ever provided portable support to hardware BCD, so since assembler stopped being a real-world option for most developers BCD support simply stopped being used.
As numbers get larger, even packed BCD is quite inefficiently packed. Number representations base 10^x have the most important properties of base 10, and are easily decoded as decimal. Base 1000 only needs 10 bits per three digits, not 12, because 2^10 is 1024. That's enough to show you get an extra decimal digit for 32 bits - 9 digits instead of 8 - and you've still got 2 bits left over, e.g. for a sign bit.
The thing is, for this digit-totalling algorithm to be worthwhile at all, you need to be working with fixed-width decimal of probably at least 32 bits (8 digits). That gives 12 operations (6 masks, 3 shifts, 3 additions) rather than 15 additions for the (fully unrolled) simple loop. That's a borderline gain, though - and other issues in the code could easily mean it's actually slower.
The efficiency gain is clearer at 64 bits (16 decimal digits) as there's still only 16 operations (8 masks, 4 shifts, 4 additions) rather than 31, but the odds of finding a processor that supports 64-bit BCD operations seems slim. And even if you did, how often do you need this anyway? It seems unlikely that it could be worth the effort and loss of portability.
Here's something in Haskell:
sumDigits n =
if n == 0
then 0
else let a = mod n 10
in a + sumDigits (div n 10)
Oh, but I just read you're doing that already...
(then there's also the obvious:
sumDigits n = sum $ map (read . (:[])) . show $ n
)
For short code, try this:
int digit_sum(int n){
if (n<10) return n;
return n%10 + digit_sum(n/10);
}
Or, in words,
-If the number is less than ten, then the digit sum is the number itself.
-Otherwise, the digit sum is the current last digit (a.k.a. n mod10 or n%10), plus the digit sum of everything to the left of that number (n divided by 10, using integer division).
-This algorithm can also be generalized for any base, substituting the base in for 10.
int digit_sum(int n)
Do
if (n<10) return n;
Exit do
else
n=n%10 + digit_sum(n/10);
Loop

Error detecting code and Hamming distance

The Hamming distance of v and w equals 2, but without parity
bit it would be just 1. Why is this the case?
This would be more appropriately asked in the theoretical computer science section of StackExchange, but since you've been honest and flagged it as homework ...
ASCII uses 7 bits to specify a character. (In ASCII, 'X' is represented by the 7 bits `1011000'.) If you start with any ASCII sequence, the number of bits you need to flip to get to another legitimate ASCII sequence is only 1 bit. Therefore the Hamming distance between plain ASCII sequences is 1.
However, if a parity bit is added (for a total of 8 bits -- the 7 ASCII bits plus one parity bit, conventionally shown in the leftmost position) then any single-bit flip in the sequence will cause the result to have incorrect parity. Following the example, with even parity 'X' is represented by 11011000, because the parity bit is chosen to give an even number of 1s in the sequence. If you now flip any single bit in that sequence then the result will be unacceptable because it will have incorrect parity. In order to arrive at an acceptable new sequence with even parity you must change a minimum of two bits. Therefore when parity is in effect the Hamming distance between acceptable sequences is 2.

Least significant bit first

While working on ruby I came across:
> "cc".unpack('b8B8')
=> ["11000110", "01100011"]
Then I tried Googleing to find a good answer on "least significant bit", but could not find any.
Anyone care to explain, or point me in the right direction where I can understand the difference between "LSB first" and "MSB first".
It has to do with the direction of the bits. Notice that in this example it's unpacking two ascii "c" characters, and yet the bits are mirror images of each other. LSB means the rightmost (least-significant) bit is the first bit. MSB means the leftmost (most-significant) is the first bit.
As a simple example, consider the number 5, which in "normal" (readable) binary looks like this:
00000101
The least significant bit is the rightmost 1, because that is the 2^0 position (or just plan 1). It doesn't impact the value too much. The one next to it is the 2^1 position (or just plain 0 in this case), which is a bit more significant. The bit to its left (2^2 or just plain 4) is more significant still. So we say this is MSB notation because the most significant bit (2^7) comes first. If we change it to LSB, it simply becomes:
10100000
Easy right?
(And yes, for all you hardware gurus out there I'm aware that this changes from one architecture to another depending on endianness, but this is a simple answer for a simple question)
The term "significance" of a bit or byte only makes sense in the context of interpreting a sequence of bits or bytes as an integer. The bigger the impact of the bit or byte on the value of the resulting integer - the higher its significance. The more "significant" it is to the value.
So, for example, when we talk about a sequence of four bytes having the least significant byte first (aka little-endian), what we mean is that when we interpret those four bytes as a 32bit integer, the first byte denotes the lowest eight binary digits of the integer, the second bytes denotes the 17th through 24th binary digits of the integer, the third denotes the 9th through 16th, and the last byte denotes the highest eight bits of the integer.
Likewise, if we say a sequence of 8 bits is in most significant bit first order, what we mean is that if we interpret the 8 bits as an 8-bit integer, the first bit in the sequence denotes the highest binary digit of the integer, the second bit the second highest, and so on, until the last bit denotes the lowest binary digit of the integer.
Another thing to think about is that one can say that the usual decimal notation has a convention that is most significant digit first. For example, a decimal number like:
1250
is read to mean:
1 x 1000 +
2 x 100 +
5 x 10 +
0 x 1
Right? Now imagine a different convention that is least significant digit first. The same number would be written:
0521
and would be read as:
0 x 1 +
5 x 10 +
2 x 100 +
1 x 1000
Another thing you should observe in passing is that in the C family of languages (most modern programming languages), the shift-left operator (<<) and shift-right operator (>>) are pointing in a most significant bit direction. That is shifting a bit left increases its significance and shifting it right decreases it, meaning that left is most significant (and the left side is usually what we mean by first, at least in the west).

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