Talk:Hamming distance

What about the hamming distance between two points in a 2-D graph for example?

Why the difference between the bits called as "Hamming distance" and not "Hamming difference" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 163.152.45.51 (talk • contribs)

I don't know the historical reasons, but I can think of a couple of plausible explanations. First, Hamming distance forms a metric and functions with that property are often called distances. Second, the difference of A and B is a quantity that, when added back to B, gives A again; that is, it is inverse to addition. Hamming distance doesn't have that property, so it doesn't make sense to call it a difference. One function that is called a difference and is closely related to Hamming distance is the symmetric difference. —David Eppstein 04:53, 5 January 2007 (UTC)