What can you do in 32 bits?
This is just a fun little game to see what you can represent in a standard 32-bit integer. As most (all?) languages allow for bitwise operations I don't care what language you program it in (or even if you program up your example). The rules are very simple: You have 32-bits of space to use. Make good use of them.
What I would like to see from you:
What you would store in the bits, what they represent, and how this is useful.
Example:
Storing a date string in an 4 bytes.
20130104 or YYYYMMDD (8 bytes in total) can be compressed down to, at most, take up 4 bytes. Here's how:
You cannot accomplish standard huffman encoding of the characters as the data required to rebuild the huffman tree would be larger than 4 bytes, however if you create a standard huffman tree that will be used by everyone, then you don't need to store tree-construction information in the data you are sending back and forth. By running a frequency count of the numbers 1 through 31 (days of the month) all concatenated together in a string (no spaces) you can construct the huffman tree like so:
Where left is a 0, and right is a 1 (bit value). At that point you have 4-bits to get to 7, 8, 9, and 5, and 3-bits for 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 0. If you have the date 9999 88 77 (not a valid date, I know) that would be: 1110 1110 1110 1110 1101 1101 1100 1100, which is 32 bits in total. This date format is also good until the year 10,000 for an added bonus.
So, what can you do with 32-bits?
This is just a fun little game to see what you can represent in a standard 32-bit integer. As most (all?) languages allow for bitwise operations I don't care what language you program it in (or even if you program up your example). The rules are very simple: You have 32-bits of space to use. Make good use of them.
What I would like to see from you:
What you would store in the bits, what they represent, and how this is useful.
Example:
Storing a date string in an 4 bytes.
20130104 or YYYYMMDD (8 bytes in total) can be compressed down to, at most, take up 4 bytes. Here's how:
You cannot accomplish standard huffman encoding of the characters as the data required to rebuild the huffman tree would be larger than 4 bytes, however if you create a standard huffman tree that will be used by everyone, then you don't need to store tree-construction information in the data you are sending back and forth. By running a frequency count of the numbers 1 through 31 (days of the month) all concatenated together in a string (no spaces) you can construct the huffman tree like so:
/ \
/ \ / \
/\ /\ /\ / \
1 2 3 0 4 6 /\ /\
7 8 9 5
Where left is a 0, and right is a 1 (bit value). At that point you have 4-bits to get to 7, 8, 9, and 5, and 3-bits for 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 0. If you have the date 9999 88 77 (not a valid date, I know) that would be: 1110 1110 1110 1110 1101 1101 1100 1100, which is 32 bits in total. This date format is also good until the year 10,000 for an added bonus.
So, what can you do with 32-bits?