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Comment on Harvest (IBM 7950): Supercomputer for cryptanalysis at the NSA in the Cold War

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One of the big features of the Harvest was the so called POPCOUNT which was supposedly added the machine at the NSA's request. (This is the number of bits in a word that are on.) I've always wondered how this might be used. Some suggest computing the Hamming distance. Others suggest some kind of statistical test like chi-squared. But are there other more algebraic solutions that can benefit from it?

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