Question

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Suppose N patients and M diseases. N is sufficiently large number and M is
relatively small, say 30-ish. Each patient can have possible 0 to M kinds of
diseases.

Given one patient’s name, show me a list of similar patients sharing same
deseases within 2-3 seconds.

Solution

Use 1 bit to represent a disease. So every patient’s conditin can be put into an integer of 32 bits.

How do we calculate the similarity of 2 patients?

Refer to [CC150v5] 5.5 Calculate Bits Conversion Required for a special bit operation (remove last ‘1’ from bit):

c = c & (c - l) clears the least significant bit of ‘1’.

Keep doing this until all ‘1’s are cleared.

For each patient, we simply calculate the XOR and count ‘1’s.

Code

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