On Fri, 23 Sep 2022, Randy Dawson via cctalk wrote:
On the top secret number cruching....
The Cray had an instruction called 'population count'
asked for by the NSA.
The number of bits on in a word, not sure what this was used for.

Interesting.

A friend of my ex was asked to code that (in C) as a test in a job interview.

It was useful as a simple test of whether an applicant had any bit-twiddling experience. But, I couldn't think of practical application.


Perhaps, some measures of central tendency of values of that in a large body of data could be useful for testing randomness in cryptography, such as checking for steganography?

--
Grumpy Ol' Fred                 ci...@xenosoft.com

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