I have a program which works with genetic algorithms and generates an 8-bit binary string (chromosome consisting of eight genes).
I would like to know how I would go about changing / flipping the first gene/bit.
For example:
Original chromosome:
01010101
Changed chromosome:
11010101 //First bit has been changed
If the first bit has a value of 1, I would like to 'flip' it to make it a 0; and, obviously, if the first bit in the array/chromosome is a 0, I would like to 'flip' that to a 1.
Thank you.
You could use the following:
chromosome ^= 0x80;
The xor-assignment (^=) flips the chromosome bits that are set in the right-hand side expression, and 0x80 is 10000000 in binary.
More generally, to flip the k-th bit (with the least significant bit being bit 0):
chromosome ^= (1 << k);
Related
I was recently looking into some problems with but manipulation in Java and I came up with two questions.
1) Firstly, I came up to the problem of flipping all the bits in a number.
I found this solution:
public class Solution {
public int flipAllBits(int num) {
int mask = (1 << (int)Math.floor(Math.log(num)/Math.log(2))+1) - 1;
return num ^ mask;
}
}
But what happens when k = 32 bits? Can the 1 be shifted 33 times?
What I understand from the code (although it doesn't really make sense), the mask is 0111111.(31 1's)....1 and not 32 1's, as someone would expect. And therefore when num is a really large number this would fail.
2) Another question I had was determining when something is a bit sequence in 2s complement or just a normal bit sequence. For example I read that 1010 when flipped is 0110 which is -10 but also 6. Which one is it and how do we know?
Thanks.
1) The Math object calls are not necessary. Flipping all the bits in any ordinal type in Java (or C) is not an arithmatic operation. It is a bitwise operation. Using the '^' operator, simply using 1- as an operand will work regardless of the sizeof int in C/C++ or a Java template with with the ordinal type as a parameter T. The tilde '~' operator is the other option.
T i = 0xf0f0f0f0;
System.out.println(T.toHexString(i));
i ^= -1;
System.out.println(T.toHexString(i));
i = ~ i;
System.out.println(T.toHexString(i));
2) Since the entire range of integers maps to the entire range of integers in a 2's compliment transform, it is not possible to detect whether a number is or is not 2's complement unless one knows the range of numbers from which the 2's complement might be calculated and the two sets (before and after) are mutually exclusive.
That mask computation is fairly inscrutable, I'm going to guess that it (attempts to, since you mention it's wrong) make a mask up to and including the highest set bit. Whether that's useful for "flipping all bits" is an other possible point of discussion, since to me at least, "all bits" means all 32 of them, not some number that depends on the value. But if that's what you want then that's what you want. Especially combined with that second question, that looks like a mistake to me, so you'd be implementing the wrong thing from the start - see near the bottom.
Anyway, the mask can be generated with some reasonably nice bitmath, which does not create any doubt about possible edge cases (eg Math.log(0) is probably bad, and k=32 corresponds with negative numbers which are also probably bad to put into a log):
int m = num | (num >> 16);
m |= m >> 8;
m |= m >> 4;
m |= m >> 2;
m |= m >> 1;
return num ^ m;
Note that this function has odd properties, it almost always returns an unsigned-lower number than went in, except at 0. It flips bits so the name is not completely wrong, but flipAllBits(flipAllBits(x)) != x (usually), while the name suggests it should be an involution.
As for the second question, there is nothing to determine. Two's complement is scheme by which you can interpret a bitvector - any bitvector. So it's really a choice you make; to interpret a given bitvector that way or some other way. In Java the "default" interpretation is two's complement (eg toString will print an int by interpreting it according to its two's complement meaning), but you don't have to go along with it, you can (with care) treat int as unsigned, or as an array of booleans, or several bitfields packed together, etc.
If you wanted to invert all the bits but made the common mistake to assume that the number of bits in an int is variable (and that you therefore needed to compute a mask that covers "all bits"), I have some great news for you, because inverting all bits is a lot easier:
return ~num;
If you were reading "invert all bits" in the context of two's complement, it would have the above meaning, so all bits, including those left of the highest set bit.
I recently learned a method in BigInteger Java class called
BigInteger.testBit(n)
Its main function is (this & (1<<n)) != 0), but I do not quite understand the source code
return (getInt(n >>> 5) & (1 << (n & 31))) != 0;
Can someone explain it?
I'm not familiar with how it's implemented, but judging by that code, I would assume that a BigInteger is implemented by storing it's value in a list of integers, and getInt(n) returns the n'th of these, where 0 = least significant.
The first will store the least significant 32 bits, getInt(1) will store bits 32-63 etc. By shifting n right by 5, you get the index of the integer in the internal list that has the bit you care about, it's the equivalent to n div 32.
With that integer, you then pick out the bit you care about from it with the (1 << (n & 31)). n & 31 is the equivalent of n modulo 32, and the 1 << is the equivalent of 2^. This gets you a bit mask that selects precisely the bit you care about.
I am trying to implement a cipher that uses a 128 bit key. Part of the key schedule is to rotate the key 29 bits to the right, but I am unsure how to do that since there is no single data type in Java that can hold the whole key. I have it stored in two longs, one for the upper half and one for the lower half. Here is the bit math that I have that I thought should work but isn't doing the trick:
keyLower >>>= 29;
keyLower |= keyUpper << 35;
keyUpper >>>= 29;
keyUpper |= keyLowerCopy << 29;
Can anyone help me out?
You have a typo on the last line:
// vv
keyUpper |= keyLowerCopy << 29;
Looks like it's supposed to be << 35.
Take a look at BigInteger.
Immutable arbitrary-precision integers. [...] Semantics of shift operations extend those of Java's shift operators to allow for negative shift distances. A right-shift with a negative shift distance results in a left shift, and vice-versa. The unsigned right shift operator (>>>) is omitted, as this operation makes little sense in combination with the "infinite word size" abstraction provided by this class.
I came across the question "Why is -1 zero fill right shift 1=2147483647 for integers in Java?"
I understood the concept of zero fill right shift perfectly well from the above question's answer. But when I tried to find -1>>1, I am getting a totally complex answer which I felt difficult to understand.
-1 in binary form is as follows: 11111111111111111111111111111111
After flipping the bits, I got: 00000000000000000000000000000000
Upon adding 1 to it, I got: 00000000000000000000000000000001
Now shifting one position right: 00000000000000000000000000000000
After flipping the bits, I got: 11111111111111111111111111111111
Now adding 1 to it: 00000000000000000000000000000000
I don't understand how -1>>1 is -1 itself, then?
When you do a normal right-shift (i.e. using >>, also known as an arithmetic right shift, as opposed to >>>, which is a logical right shift), the number is sign extended.
How this works is as follows:
When we right-shift we get an empty spot in front of the number, like so:
11111111111111111111111111111111
?1111111111111111111111111111111(1) (right-shift it one place)
The last 1 is shifted out, and in comes the ?.
Now, how we fill in the ? is dependent on how we shift.
If we do a logical shift (i.e. >>>), we simply fill it with 0.
If we do a arithmetic shift (i.e. >>), we fill it with the first bit from the original number, i.e. the sign bit (since it's 1 if the number is negative, and 0 if not). This is called sign extension.
So, in this case, -1 >> 1 sign-extends the 1 into the ?, leaving the original -1.
Further reading:
Arithmetic shift on Wikipedia
Logical shift on Wikipedia
>> is a 'signed right shift' operator, so it will preserve the leftmost bit.
So as -1 (dec) is 0xb11111111111111111111111111111111 (bin), right shifting it using >> will preserve the 1 and the result is again 0xb11111111111111111111111111111111 (bin).
For unsigned right shift, the operator >>> can be used. It always fills up with zeroes (0). In your case, -1 >>> 1 results in 0b01111111111111111111111111111111, or 2147483647, which is the largest possible (positive) 32 bit two's complement (and equal to Integer.MAX_VALUE).
I have a 3 byte signed number that I need to determine the value of in Java. I believe it is signed with one's complement but I'm not 100% sure (I haven't studied this stuff in more than 10 years and the documentation of my problem isn't super clear). I think the problem I'm having is Java does everything in two's complement. I have a specific example to show:
The original 3-byte number: 0xEE1B17
Parsed as an integer (Integer.parseInt(s, 16)) this becomes: 15604503
If I do a simple bit flip (~) of this I get (I think) a two's complement representation: -15604504
But the value I should be getting is: -1172713
What I think is happening is I'm getting the two's complement of the entire int and not just the 3 bytes of the int, but I don't know how to fix this.
What I have been able to do is convert the integer to a binary string (Integer.toBinaryString()) and then manually "flip" all of the 0s to 1s and vice-versa. When then parsing this integer (Integer.parseInt(s, 16)) I get 1172712 which is very close. In all of the other examples I need to always add 1 to the result to get the answer.
Can anyone diagnose what type of signed number encoding is being used here and if there is a solution other than manually flipping every character of a string? I feel like there must be a much more elegant way to do this.
EDIT: All of the responders have helped in different ways, but my general question was how to flip a 3-byte number and #louis-wasserman answered this and answered first so I'm marking him as the solution. Thanks to everyone for the help!
If you want to flip the low three bytes of a Java int, then you just do ^ 0x00FFFFFF.
0xFFEE1B17 is -1172713
You must only add the leading byte. FF if the highest bit of the 3-byte value is set and 00 otherwise.
A method which converts your 3-byte value to a proper intcould look like this:
if(byte3val>7FFFFF)
return byte3val| 0xFF000000;
else
return byte3val;
Negative signed numbers are defined so that a + (-a) = 0. So it means that all bits are flipped and then 1 added. See Two's complement. You can check that the condition is satisfied by this process by thinking what happens when you add a + ~a + 1.
You can recognize that a number is negative by its most significant bit. So if you need to convert a signed 3-byte number into a 4-byte number, you can do it by checking the bit and if it's set, set also the bits of the fourth byte:
if ((a & 0x800000) != 0)
a = a | 0xff000000;
You can do it also in a single expression, which will most likely perform better, because there is no branching in the computation (branching doesn't play well with pipelining in current CPUs):
a = (0xfffffe << a) >> a;
Here << and >> perform byte shifts. First we shift the number 8 bits to the right (so now it occupies the 3 "upper" bytes instead of the 3 "lower" ones), and then shift it back. The trick is that >> is so-called Arithmetic shift also known as signed shift. copies the most significant bit to all bits that are made vacant by the operation. This is exactly to keep the sign of the number. Indeed:
(0x1ffffe << 8) >> 8 -> 2097150
(0xfffffe << 8) >> 8 -> -2
Just note that java also has a unsigned right shift operator >>>. For more information, see Java Tutorial: Bitwise and Bit Shift Operators.