ORDERING BY HAMMING VALUE

摘要

Apparatus and methods are disclosed for treating an input set of weightless binary tuples to order the Hamming values thereof. In the general case, the tuples are thermometer coded in a common direction left or right and thereafter an orthogonal thermocoding operation is applied in which orthogonal tuples, each taking a bit from a respective bit position of the thermocoded tuples, is subjected to a thermocoding operation in a common direction up or down. At the completion of this operation the tuples represent the Hamming values of the input tuples, ranked in Hamming value order. The first thermocoding operation may be omitted where the input tuples are already in thermometer code. Also described is a scheme, which uses a tagging procedure to give the result in terms of the original weightless binary tuples, whereby the input pattern information is preserved.