Previous | ToC | Next Labs: Error Correction and Compression. Part 1. Math Alive

Decoding Hamming Code


All in all, there are 16 possible codewords:
0000000
0001011
0010111
0011100
0100101
0101110
0110010
0111001
1000110
1001101
1010001
1011010
1100011
1101000
1110100
1111111

How does decoding work? Again, by some kind of majority vote. Given a string of 7 bits, it can either be one of the 16 codewords, and then we know what the original string was, or it can be a corrupted codeword. In that last case, we simply find the codeword in the list of all possible codewords that differs least from our string.

For instance, if the string is 1010110, then the most similar codeword is 1000110 (since it differs in only one entry), and so the decoded string is given by the first 4 bits of that codeword, namely 1000.

Let's try a few examples. After typing in your answer, press return to see if you are correct:

Practice
Decoding Hamming Code



Previous | ToC | Next Last Modified: August 2008