Tight Cell-Probe Bounds for Online Hamming Distance Computation

Abstract: We show tight bounds for online Hamming distance computation in the cell-probe model with word size w. The task is to output the Hamming distance between a fixed string of length n and the last n symbols of a stream. We give a lower bound of Omega((d/w)*log n) time on average per output, where d is the number of bits needed to represent an input symbol. We argue that this bound is tight within the model. The lower bound holds under randomisation and amortisation.