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42 lines
1.4 KiB
Markdown
42 lines
1.4 KiB
Markdown
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# Hamming
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Welcome to Hamming on Exercism's Zig Track.
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If you need help running the tests or submitting your code, check out `HELP.md`.
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## Instructions
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Calculate the Hamming Distance between two DNA strands.
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Your body is made up of cells that contain DNA.
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Those cells regularly wear out and need replacing, which they achieve by dividing into daughter cells.
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In fact, the average human body experiences about 10 quadrillion cell divisions in a lifetime!
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When cells divide, their DNA replicates too.
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Sometimes during this process mistakes happen and single pieces of DNA get encoded with the incorrect information.
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If we compare two strands of DNA and count the differences between them we can see how many mistakes occurred.
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This is known as the "Hamming Distance".
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We read DNA using the letters C,A,G and T.
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Two strands might look like this:
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GAGCCTACTAACGGGAT
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CATCGTAATGACGGCCT
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^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^^
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They have 7 differences, and therefore the Hamming Distance is 7.
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The Hamming Distance is useful for lots of things in science, not just biology, so it's a nice phrase to be familiar with :)
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## Implementation notes
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The Hamming distance is only defined for sequences of equal length, so an attempt to calculate it between sequences of different lengths should not work.
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## Source
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### Created by
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- @massivelivefun
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### Based on
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The Calculating Point Mutations problem at Rosalind - https://rosalind.info/problems/hamm/
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