Hamming distance is the number of positions in which two different strings are different.

So the distance between both strings would be:

• “abcde” and “abede” - 1
• “momomo” and “nonono” - 3

Implementing this would not be difficult:

def hammingDistance(s1: String, s2: String): Int = s1.zip(s2).count(c => c._1 != c._2)

Basically you zip ("abc".zip("bcd") produces scala.collection.immutable.IndexedSeq[(Char, Char)] = Vector((a,b), (b,d), (c,e))) strings together and compare corresponding characters. Simple, right?

However, the task I was working on required comparing individual bits, which are slightly more tricky to get to. I couldn’t find quickly any public snippets that do this, so I wrote my own:

To get the number of different bits of two bytes we only need to XOR them and compute how many bits are set:

For example: 0b10010101 XOR 0b01011101 = 0b11001000.

To calculate the number of bits set we just shift the XORed byte i number of times and AND 1 to get rid of other bits.

This method has a performance flaw as it shifts i times for each bit as opposed to shifting once per bit and relying on previous results, but oh well - it’s suitable when high performance is not necessary.