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bitwise operations

Bit Manipulation Tricks

A collection of essential bit manipulation idioms used in competitive programming and systems code. Includes isolating the rightmost set bit, turning off the rightmost set bit, checking if a number has alternating bits, and computing absolute value without branching. These tricks often replace loops or conditionals with constant-time operations.

Use Cases

  • •Competitive programming and coding interviews
  • •Optimizing inner loops in performance-critical code
  • •Fenwick trees and segment trees using lowest set bit
  • •Branchless programming for SIMD and GPU code

Complexity Analysis

MetricBestAverageWorst
TimeO(1)O(1)O(1)
SpaceO(1)

Visualization

Isolate Rightmostn=120000110076543210
Speed:1x
Trick 1: Isolate the rightmost set bit using n & (-n). Starting with n=12.Step 1 / 6

Implementation

Output

Click "Run Code" to see output...