C – Saturating Signed Integer Multiplication with Bitwise Operators

bit-manipulationcmultiplicationsaturation-arithmetic

Alright, so the assignment I have to do is to multiply a signed integer by 2 and return the value. If the value overflows then saturate it by returning Tmin or Tmax instead. The challenge is using only these logical operators (! ~ & ^ | + << >>) with no (if statements, loops, etc.) and only allowed a maximum of 20 logical operators.

Now my thought process to tackle this problem was first to find the limits. So I divided Tmin/max by 2 to get the boundaries. Here's what I have:

Positive

This and higher works:

1100000...

This and lower doesn't:

1011111...

If it doesn't work I need to return this:

100000...

Negative

This and lower works:

0011111...

This and higher doesn't:

0100000...

If it doesn't work I need to return this:

011111...

Otherwise I have to return:

2 * x;

(the integers are 32-bit by the way)

I see that the first two bits are important in determining whether or not the problem should return 2*x or the limits. For example an XOR would do since if the first to bits are the same then 2*x should be returned otherwise the limits should be returned. Another if statement is then needed for the sign of the integer for it is negative Tmin needs to be returned, otherwise Tmax needs to be.

Now my question is, how do you do this without using if statements? xD Or a better question is the way I am planning this out going to work or even feasible under the constraints? Or even better question is whether there is an easier way to solve this, and if so how? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Best Answer

a = (x>>31); // fills the integer with the sign bit 
b = (x<<1) >> 31; // fills the integer with the MSB 
x <<= 1; // multiplies by 2
x ^= (a^b)&(x^b^0x80000000); // saturate

So how does this work. The first two lines use the arithmetic right shift to fill the whole integer with a selected bit.

The last line is basically the "if statement". If a==b then the right hand side evaluates to 0 and none of the bits in x are flipped. Otherwise it must be the case that a==~b and the right hand side evaluates to x^b^0x80000000. After the statement is applied x will equal x^x^b^0x80000000 => b^0x80000000 which is exactly the saturation value.

Edit:

Here is it in the context of an actual program.

#include<stdio.h>
main(){
    int i = 0xFFFF;
    while(i<<=1){
        int a = i >> 31;
        int b = (i << 1) >> 31;
        int x = i << 1;
        x ^= (a^b) & (x ^ b ^ 0x80000000);
        printf("%d, %d\n", i, x);
    }
}

The Operators

>> is the arithmetic (or signed) right shift operator.
>>> is the logical (or unsigned) right shift operator.
<< is the left shift operator, and meets the needs of both logical and arithmetic shifts.

All of these operators can be applied to integer values (int, long, possibly short and byte or char). In some languages, applying the shift operators to any datatype smaller than int automatically resizes the operand to be an int.

Note that <<< is not an operator, because it would be redundant.

Also note that C and C++ do not distinguish between the right shift operators. They provide only the >> operator, and the right-shifting behavior is implementation defined for signed types. The rest of the answer uses the C# / Java operators.

(In all mainstream C and C++ implementations including GCC and Clang/LLVM, >> on signed types is arithmetic. Some code assumes this, but it isn't something the standard guarantees. It's not undefined, though; the standard requires implementations to define it one way or another. However, left shifts of negative signed numbers is undefined behaviour (signed integer overflow). So unless you need arithmetic right shift, it's usually a good idea to do your bit-shifting with unsigned types.)

Left shift (<<)

Integers are stored, in memory, as a series of bits. For example, the number 6 stored as a 32-bit int would be:

00000000 00000000 00000000 00000110

Shifting this bit pattern to the left one position (6 << 1) would result in the number 12:

00000000 00000000 00000000 00001100

As you can see, the digits have shifted to the left by one position, and the last digit on the right is filled with a zero. You might also note that shifting left is equivalent to multiplication by powers of 2. So 6 << 1 is equivalent to 6 * 2, and 6 << 3 is equivalent to 6 * 8. A good optimizing compiler will replace multiplications with shifts when possible.

Non-circular shifting

Please note that these are not circular shifts. Shifting this value to the left by one position (3,758,096,384 << 1):

11100000 00000000 00000000 00000000

results in 3,221,225,472:

11000000 00000000 00000000 00000000

The digit that gets shifted "off the end" is lost. It does not wrap around.

Logical right shift (>>>)

A logical right shift is the converse to the left shift. Rather than moving bits to the left, they simply move to the right. For example, shifting the number 12:

00000000 00000000 00000000 00001100

to the right by one position (12 >>> 1) will get back our original 6:

00000000 00000000 00000000 00000110

So we see that shifting to the right is equivalent to division by powers of 2.

Lost bits are gone

However, a shift cannot reclaim "lost" bits. For example, if we shift this pattern:

00111000 00000000 00000000 00000110

to the left 4 positions (939,524,102 << 4), we get 2,147,483,744:

10000000 00000000 00000000 01100000

and then shifting back ((939,524,102 << 4) >>> 4) we get 134,217,734:

00001000 00000000 00000000 00000110

We cannot get back our original value once we have lost bits.

Arithmetic right shift (>>)

The arithmetic right shift is exactly like the logical right shift, except instead of padding with zero, it pads with the most significant bit. This is because the most significant bit is the sign bit, or the bit that distinguishes positive and negative numbers. By padding with the most significant bit, the arithmetic right shift is sign-preserving.

For example, if we interpret this bit pattern as a negative number:

10000000 00000000 00000000 01100000

we have the number -2,147,483,552. Shifting this to the right 4 positions with the arithmetic shift (-2,147,483,552 >> 4) would give us:

11111000 00000000 00000000 00000110

or the number -134,217,722.

So we see that we have preserved the sign of our negative numbers by using the arithmetic right shift, rather than the logical right shift. And once again, we see that we are performing division by powers of 2.

Conditional Using Bitwise Operators

Are shifts allowed as bitwise operators? Are arithmetic operators allowed?

Your edit is not entirely clear, but I assume that you need to implement an equivalent of

a ? b : c

where a, b and c are integers. This is in turn equivalent to

a != 0 ? b : c

One way to achieve that is to find a way to turn non-zero value of a into an all-ones bit pattern using only bitwise operators. If we figure out how to do that, the rest would be easy. Now, I don't immediately remember any ingenious tricks that would do that (they do exist I believe), and I don't know for sure which operators are allowed and which are not, so for now I will just use something like

a |= a >> 1; a |= a >> 2; a |= a >> 4; a |= a >> 8; a |= a >> 16;
a |= a << 1; a |= a << 2; a |= a << 4; a |= a << 8; a |= a << 16;

For a 32-bit integer type, if (and only if) there was at least one bit set in the original a, the above should result in all bits of a set to 1. (Let's assume we are working with unsigned integers, to avoid the issues associated with shifting of signed values). Again, there must be a more clever way to do that, I'm sure. For example: a = !a - 1, but I don't know if ! and - are allowed.

Once we've done that, the original conditional operator becomes equivalent to

(a & b) | (~a & c)

Done.