Hamming weight

Okay, kiddo, have you ever seen a bunch of marbles in a jar? Let's say we have ten marbles in the jar. If we count how many marbles are in the jar, we'd say there are ten marbles.

Now imagine each marble is a number, and each number is made up of a bunch of tiny pieces called bits. Some numbers have more bits than others. The hamming weight is a fancy way to count how many bits are different from zero in a number.

For example, let's say we have the number 10110. To find the hamming weight, we count how many bits are different from zero. So in this case, there are three bits that are not zero: the first, third, and fourth bits. That means the hamming weight of 10110 is three.

Hamming weight is useful because it can help us detect errors in code or data. If we know the hamming weight of a number should be a certain value, but we count a different number of non-zero bits, that tells us there might be an error somewhere.