A Review of Population Count Algorithms in Binary Sequence: Through a Software Perspective

Counting of number of set bits as high in a binary sequence is a very important and a powerful domain question that has it’s wide applications in cryptography, statistical machine learning, as well as information theory of data retrieval. With the increasing demand in software systems for tabulating the hamming weight/ Population Count / Bit count , unfortunately the classical algorithm of bitwise iteration remains widespread. The present study explores the various software-based algorithms used in the current objective like Brian-Kerninghan, LookUp Table algorithm, etc. Upon performing the complexity comparison study of time as well as space complexities its concludable that Lookup table method is about 5 times more efficient than the traditional sequential search.