
How Hamming codes work - squeakynick
http://datagenetics.com/blog/january42016/index.html
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bstanfield
Just so you know, this is the same Hamming that published the classic essay,
"You and Your Research" (1986):
[https://www.site.uottawa.ca/~yymao/misc/Hamming_kaiser.html](https://www.site.uottawa.ca/~yymao/misc/Hamming_kaiser.html)

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squeakynick
He's also the mathematician who worked on the Manhattan Project and was asked
to confirm the calculations that setting off the first test blast would not
create a fireball that would burn up all the oxygen on the planet!

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wodenokoto
Is it from him we get hamming and Manhattan distances?

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dalke
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hamming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hamming)
\- "Known for: Hamming code, Hamming window, Hamming numbers, Hamming
distance, Association for Computing Machinery"

I do not know the origin of the term "Manhattan distance".
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_geometry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_geometry)
says the concept comes from Minkowski in the 1800s, and a Google Scholar and
Google ngram search suggest the term originates from around 1960, and the more
common older term was "rectilinear distance".

(See
[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Manhattan+dist...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Manhattan+distance%2Ctaxicab+geometry%2Crectilinear+distance&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CManhattan%20distance%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ctaxicab%20geometry%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Crectilinear%20distance%3B%2Cc0)
.)

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qntty
Manhattan distance is because Manhattan is a grid, and that's how taxis drive
or how people walk.

~~~
dalke
Yes. That's also described in the link I gave, including a picture.

My question is, who introduced the term to the literature? Was it Hamming, or
someone else?

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misterdata
The same idea can be applied to a two-dimensional grid of bits:
[http://datagenetics.com/blog/december12014/index.html](http://datagenetics.com/blog/december12014/index.html)

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samfisher83
I wish someone would make a guide like this for raptor codes.

