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XOR | |
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Truth table | |
Logic gate | |
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Disjunctive | |
Conjunctive | |
Zhegalkin polynomial | |
Post's lattices | |
0-preserving | yes |
1-preserving | no |
Monotone | no |
Affine | yes |
Self-dual | no |
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Exclusive or, exclusive disjunction, exclusive alternation, logical non-equivalence, or logical inequality is a logical operator whose negation is the logical biconditional. With two inputs, XOR is true if and only if the inputs differ (one is true, one is false). With multiple inputs, XOR is true if and only if the number of true inputs is odd. [1]
It gains the name "exclusive or" because the meaning of "or" is ambiguous when both operands are true. XOR excludes that case. Some informal ways of describing XOR are "one or the other but not both", "either one or the other", and "A or B, but not A and B".
It is symbolized by the prefix operator [2] : 16 and by the infix operators XOR ( /ˌɛksˈɔːr/ , /ˌɛksˈɔː/ , /ˈksɔːr/ or /ˈksɔː/ ), EOR, EXOR, , , , ⩛, , , and .
The truth table of shows that it outputs true whenever the inputs differ:
F | F | F |
F | T | T |
T | F | T |
T | T | F |
Exclusive disjunction essentially means 'either one, but not both nor none'. In other words, the statement is true if and only if one is true and the other is false. For example, if two horses are racing, then one of the two will win the race, but not both of them. The exclusive disjunction , also denoted by or , can be expressed in terms of the logical conjunction ("logical and", ), the disjunction ("logical or", ), and the negation () as follows:
The exclusive disjunction can also be expressed in the following way:
This representation of XOR may be found useful when constructing a circuit or network, because it has only one operation and small number of and operations. A proof of this identity is given below:
It is sometimes useful to write in the following way:
or:
This equivalence can be established by applying De Morgan's laws twice to the fourth line of the above proof.
The exclusive or is also equivalent to the negation of a logical biconditional, by the rules of material implication (a material conditional is equivalent to the disjunction of the negation of its antecedent and its consequence) and material equivalence.
In summary, we have, in mathematical and in engineering notation:
By applying the spirit of De Morgan's laws, we get:
Although the operators (conjunction) and (disjunction) are very useful in logic systems, they fail a more generalizable structure in the following way:
The systems and are monoids, but neither is a group. This unfortunately prevents the combination of these two systems into larger structures, such as a mathematical ring.
However, the system using exclusive or is an abelian group. The combination of operators and over elements produce the well-known two-element field . This field can represent any logic obtainable with the system and has the added benefit of the arsenal of algebraic analysis tools for fields.
More specifically, if one associates with 0 and with 1, one can interpret the logical "AND" operation as multiplication on and the "XOR" operation as addition on :
The description of a Boolean function as a polynomial in , using this basis, is called the function's algebraic normal form. [3]
Disjunction is often understood exclusively in natural languages. In English, the disjunctive word "or" is often understood exclusively, particularly when used with the particle "either". The English example below would normally be understood in conversation as implying that Mary is not both a singer and a poet. [4] [5]
However, disjunction can also be understood inclusively, even in combination with "either". For instance, the first example below shows that "either" can be felicitously used in combination with an outright statement that both disjuncts are true. The second example shows that the exclusive inference vanishes away under downward entailing contexts. If disjunction were understood as exclusive in this example, it would leave open the possibility that some people ate both rice and beans. [4]
Examples such as the above have motivated analyses of the exclusivity inference as pragmatic conversational implicatures calculated on the basis of an inclusive semantics. Implicatures are typically cancellable and do not arise in downward entailing contexts if their calculation depends on the Maxim of Quantity. However, some researchers have treated exclusivity as a bona fide semantic entailment and proposed nonclassical logics which would validate it. [4]
This behavior of English "or" is also found in other languages. However, many languages have disjunctive constructions which are robustly exclusive such as French soit... soit. [4]
The symbol used for exclusive disjunction varies from one field of application to the next, and even depends on the properties being emphasized in a given context of discussion. In addition to the abbreviation "XOR", any of the following symbols may also be seen:
If using binary values for true (1) and false (0), then exclusive or works exactly like addition modulo 2.
Exclusive disjunction is often used for bitwise operations. Examples:
As noted above, since exclusive disjunction is identical to addition modulo 2, the bitwise exclusive disjunction of two n-bit strings is identical to the standard vector of addition in the vector space .
In computer science, exclusive disjunction has several uses:
In logical circuits, a simple adder can be made with an XOR gate to add the numbers, and a series of AND, OR and NOT gates to create the carry output.
On some computer architectures, it is more efficient to store a zero in a register by XOR-ing the register with itself (bits XOR-ed with themselves are always zero) than to load and store the value zero.
In cryptography, XOR is sometimes used as a simple, self-inverse mixing function, such as in one-time pad or Feistel network systems.[ citation needed ] XOR is also heavily used in block ciphers such as AES (Rijndael) or Serpent and in block cipher implementation (CBC, CFB, OFB or CTR).
In simple threshold-activated artificial neural networks, modeling the XOR function requires a second layer because XOR is not a linearly separable function.
Similarly, XOR can be used in generating entropy pools for hardware random number generators. The XOR operation preserves randomness, meaning that a random bit XORed with a non-random bit will result in a random bit. Multiple sources of potentially random data can be combined using XOR, and the unpredictability of the output is guaranteed to be at least as good as the best individual source. [22]
XOR is used in RAID 3–6 for creating parity information. For example, RAID can "back up" bytes 100111002 and 011011002 from two (or more) hard drives by XORing the just mentioned bytes, resulting in (111100002) and writing it to another drive. Under this method, if any one of the three hard drives are lost, the lost byte can be re-created by XORing bytes from the remaining drives. For instance, if the drive containing 011011002 is lost, 100111002 and 111100002 can be XORed to recover the lost byte. [23]
XOR is also used to detect an overflow in the result of a signed binary arithmetic operation. If the leftmost retained bit of the result is not the same as the infinite number of digits to the left, then that means overflow occurred. XORing those two bits will give a "1" if there is an overflow.
XOR can be used to swap two numeric variables in computers, using the XOR swap algorithm; however this is regarded as more of a curiosity and not encouraged in practice.
XOR linked lists leverage XOR properties in order to save space to represent doubly linked list data structures.
In computer graphics, XOR-based drawing methods are often used to manage such items as bounding boxes and cursors on systems without alpha channels or overlay planes.
It is also called "not left-right arrow" (\nleftrightarrow
) in LaTeX-based markdown (). Apart from the ASCII codes, the operator is encoded at U+22BB⊻XOR (⊻) and U+2295⊕CIRCLED PLUS (⊕, ⊕), both in block mathematical operators.
In logic, disjunction, also known as logical disjunction or logical or or logical addition or inclusive disjunction, is a logical connective typically notated as and read aloud as "or". For instance, the English language sentence "it is sunny or it is warm" can be represented in logic using the disjunctive formula , assuming that abbreviates "it is sunny" and abbreviates "it is warm".
In logic, a logical connective is a logical constant. Connectives can be used to connect logical formulas. For instance in the syntax of propositional logic, the binary connective can be used to join the two atomic formulas and , rendering the complex formula .
In Boolean functions and propositional calculus, the Sheffer stroke denotes a logical operation that is equivalent to the negation of the conjunction operation, expressed in ordinary language as "not both". It is also called non-conjunction, or alternative denial, or NAND. In digital electronics, it corresponds to the NAND gate. It is named after Henry Maurice Sheffer and written as or as or as or as in Polish notation by Łukasiewicz.
In propositional logic and Boolean algebra, De Morgan's laws, also known as De Morgan's theorem, are a pair of transformation rules that are both valid rules of inference. They are named after Augustus De Morgan, a 19th-century British mathematician. The rules allow the expression of conjunctions and disjunctions purely in terms of each other via negation.
In boolean logic, a disjunctive normal form (DNF) is a canonical normal form of a logical formula consisting of a disjunction of conjunctions; it can also be described as an OR of ANDs, a sum of products, or — in philosophical logic — a cluster concept. As a normal form, it is useful in automated theorem proving.
In Boolean logic, a formula is in conjunctive normal form (CNF) or clausal normal form if it is a conjunction of one or more clauses, where a clause is a disjunction of literals; otherwise put, it is a product of sums or an AND of ORs. As a canonical normal form, it is useful in automated theorem proving and circuit theory.
In logic, negation, also called the logical not or logical complement, is an operation that takes a proposition to another proposition "not ", standing for " is not true", written , or . It is interpreted intuitively as being true when is false, and false when is true. Negation is thus a unary logical connective. It may be applied as an operation on notions, propositions, truth values, or semantic values more generally. In classical logic, negation is normally identified with the truth function that takes truth to falsity. In intuitionistic logic, according to the Brouwer–Heyting–Kolmogorov interpretation, the negation of a proposition is the proposition whose proofs are the refutations of .
In Boolean logic, logical NOR, non-disjunction, or joint denial is a truth-functional operator which produces a result that is the negation of logical or. That is, a sentence of the form (p NOR q) is true precisely when neither p nor q is true—i.e. when both p and q are false. It is logically equivalent to and , where the symbol signifies logical negation, signifies OR, and signifies AND.
In mathematics, a Heyting algebra (also known as pseudo-Boolean algebra) is a bounded lattice (with join and meet operations written ∨ and ∧ and with least element 0 and greatest element 1) equipped with a binary operation a → b of implication such that (c ∧ a) ≤ b is equivalent to c ≤ (a → b). From a logical standpoint, A → B is by this definition the weakest proposition for which modus ponens, the inference rule A → B, A ⊢ B, is sound. Like Boolean algebras, Heyting algebras form a variety axiomatizable with finitely many equations. Heyting algebras were introduced by Arend Heyting (1930) to formalize intuitionistic logic.
In mathematical logic, a formula is in negation normal form (NNF) if the negation operator (, not) is only applied to variables and the only other allowed Boolean operators are conjunction (, and) and disjunction (, or).
In logic, a truth function is a function that accepts truth values as input and produces a unique truth value as output. In other words: the input and output of a truth function are all truth values; a truth function will always output exactly one truth value, and inputting the same truth value(s) will always output the same truth value. The typical example is in propositional logic, wherein a compound statement is constructed using individual statements connected by logical connectives; if the truth value of the compound statement is entirely determined by the truth value(s) of the constituent statement(s), the compound statement is called a truth function, and any logical connectives used are said to be truth functional.
In Boolean algebra, the algebraic normal form (ANF), ring sum normal form, Zhegalkin normal form, or Reed–Muller expansion is a way of writing propositional logic formulas in one of three subforms:
In mathematical logic and automated theorem proving, resolution is a rule of inference leading to a refutation-complete theorem-proving technique for sentences in propositional logic and first-order logic. For propositional logic, systematically applying the resolution rule acts as a decision procedure for formula unsatisfiability, solving the Boolean satisfiability problem. For first-order logic, resolution can be used as the basis for a semi-algorithm for the unsatisfiability problem of first-order logic, providing a more practical method than one following from Gödel's completeness theorem.
Logical equality is a logical operator that compares two truth values, or more generally, two formulas, such that it gives the value True if both arguments have the same truth value, and False if they are different. In the case where formulas have free variables, we say two formulas are equal when their truth values are equal for all possible resolutions of free variables. It corresponds to equality in Boolean algebra and to the logical biconditional in propositional calculus.
XOR gate is a digital logic gate that gives a true output when the number of true inputs is odd. An XOR gate implements an exclusive or from mathematical logic; that is, a true output results if one, and only one, of the inputs to the gate is true. If both inputs are false (0/LOW) or both are true, a false output results. XOR represents the inequality function, i.e., the output is true if the inputs are not alike otherwise the output is false. A way to remember XOR is "must have one or the other but not both".
The XNOR gate is a digital logic gate whose function is the logical complement of the Exclusive OR (XOR) gate. It is equivalent to the logical connective from mathematical logic, also known as the material biconditional. The two-input version implements logical equality, behaving according to the truth table to the right, and hence the gate is sometimes called an "equivalence gate". A high output (1) results if both of the inputs to the gate are the same. If one but not both inputs are high (1), a low output (0) results.
In logic, a functionally complete set of logical connectives or Boolean operators is one that can be used to express all possible truth tables by combining members of the set into a Boolean expression. A well-known complete set of connectives is { AND, NOT }. Each of the singleton sets { NAND } and { NOR } is functionally complete. However, the set { AND, OR } is incomplete, due to its inability to express NOT.
A truth table is a mathematical table used in logic—specifically in connection with Boolean algebra, Boolean functions, and propositional calculus—which sets out the functional values of logical expressions on each of their functional arguments, that is, for each combination of values taken by their logical variables. In particular, truth tables can be used to show whether a propositional expression is true for all legitimate input values, that is, logically valid.
The Tseytin transformation, alternatively written Tseitin transformation, takes as input an arbitrary combinatorial logic circuit and produces an equisatisfiable boolean formula in conjunctive normal form (CNF). The length of the formula is linear in the size of the circuit. Input vectors that make the circuit output "true" are in 1-to-1 correspondence with assignments that satisfy the formula. This reduces the problem of circuit satisfiability on any circuit to the satisfiability problem on 3-CNF formulas. It was discovered by the Russian scientist Grigori Tseitin.