Exclusive or

Exclusive or or exclusive disjunction or exclusive alternation,

also known as non-equivalence which is the negation of
Exclusive or
equivalence, is a logical operation that is true if and only if its XOR
arguments differ (one is true, the other is false).[1]

It is symbolized by the prefix operator [2] and by the infix

operators XOR (/ˌɛks ˈɔːr/, /ˌɛks ˈɔː/, /ˈksɔːr/ or /ˈksɔː/), EOR,
EXOR, , , , ⩛, , and . The negation of XOR is the
logical biconditional, which yields true if and only if the two inputs
are the same. Truth table
Logic gate
It gains the name "exclusive or" because the meaning of "or" is
ambiguous when both operands are true; the exclusive or operator
excludes that case. This is sometimes thought of as "one or the Normal forms
other but not both" or "either one or the other". This could be Disjunctive
written as "A or B, but not, A and B". Conjunctive
Since it is associative, it may be considered to be an n-ary operator Zhegalkin
which is true if and only if an odd number of arguments are true. polynomial
That is, a XOR b XOR ... may be treated as XOR(a,b,...). Post's lattices
0-preserving yes
Definition 1-preserving no

The truth table of shows that it outputs true whenever the Monotone no
inputs differ: Affine yes

False False False

False True True

True False True

True True False

Equivalences, elimination, and

introduction
Exclusive disjunction essentially means 'either one, but not both nor Venn diagram of
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: Arguments on the left combined by
XOR. This is a binary Walsh matrix
(cf. Hadamard code).

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:

Negation of the operator

The spirit of De Morgan's laws can be applied, we have:
Relation to modern algebra
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]

Exclusive or in natural language

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]

1. Mary is a singer or a poet.

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]

2. Mary is either a singer or a poet or both.

3. Nobody ate either rice or beans.

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]

Alternative symbols
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:

was used by George Boole in 1847.[6] Although Boole used mainly on classes, he also
considered the case that are propositions in , and at the time is a connective.
Furthermore, Boole used it exclusively. Although such use doesn't show the relationship
between inclusive disjunction (for which is almost fixedly used nowadays) and exclusive
disjunction, and may also bright about confusions with its other uses, some modern
textbooks still keep such use.[7]
was used by Christine Ladd-Franklin in 1883.[8] Strictly speaking, Ladd used to
express " is-not " or "No is ", i.e., used as exclusions, while implicitly has the
meaning of exclusive disjunction since the article is titled as "On the Algebra of Logic".
, denoting the negation of equivalence, was used by Ernst Schröder in 1890,[9]: 307 
Although the usage of as equivalence could be dated back to George Boole in 1847,[6]
during the 40 years after Boole, his followers, such as Charles Sanders Peirce, Hugh
MacColl, Giuseppe Peano and so on, didn't use as non-equivalence literally which is
possibly because it could be defined from negation and equivalence easily.
was used by Giuseppe Peano in 1894:[10]: 10 " . The sign
corresponds to Latin aut; the sign to vel." Note that the Latin word "aut" means "exclusive
or" and "vel" means "inclusive or", and that Peano use as inclusive disjunction.
was used by Izrail Solomonovich Gradshtein (Израиль Соломонович Градштейн) in
1936.[11]: 76 
was used by Claude Shannon in 1938.[12] Shannon borrowed the symbol as exclusive
disjunction from Edward Vermilye Huntington in 1904.[13] Huntington borrowed the symbol
from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1890 (the original date is not definitely known, but almost
certainly it's written after 1685; and 1890 is the publishing time).[14] While both Huntington in
1904 and Leibniz in 1890 used the symbol as an algebraic operation. Furthermore,
Huntington in 1904 used the symbol as inclusive disjunction (logical sum) too, and in 1933
used as inclusive disjunction.[15]
, also denoting the negation of equivalence, was used by Alonzo Church in 1944.[16]
(as a prefix operator, ) was used by Józef Maria Bocheński in 1954.[2] Somebody[17]
may mistake that it's Jan Łukasiewicz who is the first to use for exclusive disjunction (it
seems that the mistake spreads widely), while neither in 1929[18] nor in other works did
Łukasiewicz make such use. In fact, in 1954 Bocheński introduced a system of Polish
notation that names all 16 binary connectives of classical logic which is a compatible
extension of the notation of Łukasiewicz in 1929, and in which for exclusive disjunction
appeared at the first time. Bocheński's usage of as exclusive disjunction has no
relationship with the Polish "alternatywa rozłączna" of "exclusive or" and is an accident for
which see the table on page 16 of the book in 1954.
^, the caret, has been used in several programming languages to denote the bitwise
exclusive or operator, beginning with C[19] and also including C++, C#, D, Java, Perl, Ruby,
PHP and Python.
 The symmetric difference of two sets and , which may be interpreted as their
elementwise exclusive or, has variously been denoted as , , or .[20]

Properties
Commutativity: yes
         
         

Associativity: yes
         

                   

Distributivity:
The exclusive or doesn't distribute over any binary function (not even itself), but logical
conjunction distributes over exclusive or. (Conjunction
and exclusive or form the multiplication and addition operations of a field GF(2), and as in
any field they obey the distributive law.)
Idempotency: no
                   
                   

Monotonicity: no
         

                   

Truth-preserving: no
When all inputs are true, the output is not true.
         

         

Falsehood-preserving: yes
When all inputs are false, the output is false.
         

         

Walsh spectrum: (2,0,0,−2)

Non-linearity: 0
The function is linear.
If using binary values for true (1) and false (0), then exclusive or works exactly like addition modulo 2.

Computer science

Bitwise operation
Traditional
Exclusive disjunction is often used for bitwise operations. Examples:
symbolic
1 XOR 1 = 0 representation of
an XOR logic gate
1 XOR 0 = 1
0 XOR 1 = 1
0 XOR 0 = 0
11102 XOR 10012 = 01112 (this is equivalent to addition
without carry)

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:

It tells whether two bits are unequal.

It is an optional bit-flipper (the deciding input chooses
whether to invert the data input).
It tells whether there is an odd number of 1 bits (
Nimber addition is the exclusive or
is true if and only if an odd number
of nonnegative integers in binary
of the variables are true), which is equal to the parity bit
representation. This is also the
returned by a parity function.
vector addition in .
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) instead of loading and storing the value zero.

In simple threshold-activated neural networks, modeling the XOR function requires a second layer because
XOR is not a linearly separable function.

Exclusive-or is sometimes used as a simple mixing function in cryptography, for example, with one-time
pad or Feistel network systems.

Exclusive-or is also heavily used in block ciphers such as AES (Rijndael) or Serpent and in block cipher
implementation (CBC, CFB, OFB or CTR).

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.[21]
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.[22]

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.

Encodings
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.

See also
Material conditional • (Paradox)
Affirming a disjunct
Ampheck
Controlled NOT gate
Disjunctive syllogism
Inclusive or
Involution
List of Boolean algebra topics
Logical graph
Logical value
Propositional calculus
Rule 90
XOR cipher
XOR gate
XOR linked list

Notes
1. Germundsson, Roger; Weisstein, Eric. "XOR" (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/XOR.html).
MathWorld. Wolfram Research. Retrieved 17 June 2015.
 2. Bocheński, J. M. (1954). Précis de logique mathématique (https://burjcdigital.urjc.es/bitstrea
m/handle/10115/1425/PRECIS_DE_LOGIQUE_MATHEMATIQUE.pdf?sequence=1&isAllo
wed=y) [A Precis of Mathematical Logic] (PDF) (in French). Netherlands: F. G. Kroonder,
Bussum, Pays-Bas. p. 16.
3. Joux, Antoine (2009). "9.2: Algebraic normal forms of Boolean functions" (https://books.googl
e.com/books?id=buQajqt-_iUC&pg=PA285). Algorithmic Cryptanalysis. CRC Press.
pp. 285–286. ISBN 9781420070033.
4. Aloni, Maria (2016). "Disjunction" (https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/disjun
ction/). In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter
2016 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Retrieved 2020-09-03.
5. Jennings quotes numerous authors saying that the word "or" has an exclusive sense. See
Chapter 3, "The First Myth of 'Or'":
Jennings, R. E. (1994). The Genealogy of Disjunction. New York: Oxford University Press.
6. Boole, G. (1847). The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, Being an Essay Towards a Calculus
of Deductive Reasoning (https://archive.org/details/mathematicalanal00booluoft).
Cambridge/London: Macmillan, Barclay, & Macmillan/George Bell. p. 17.
7. Rautenberg, W. (2010). A Concise Introduction to Mathematical Logic (3 ed.). New York,
Dordrecht, Heidelberg and London: Springer. p. 3.
8. Ladd, Christine (1883). "On the Algebra of Logic" (https://archive.org/details/studiesinlogic00
peiruoft/page/16). In Peirce, C. S. (ed.). Studies in Logic by Members of the Johns Hopkins
University. Boston: Little, Brown & Company. pp. 17–71.
9. Schröder, E. (1890). Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik (Exakte Logik), Erster Band (in
German). Leipzig: Druck und Verlag B. G. Teubner. Reprinted by Thoemmes Press in 2000.
10. Peano, G. (1894). Notations de logique mathématique. Introduction au formulaire de
mathématique. Turin: Fratelli Bocca. Reprinted in Peano, G. (1958). Opere Scelte, Volume II
(https://archive.org/details/operescelte0002gius/page/n5/mode/2up). Roma: Edizioni
Cremonese. pp. 123–176.
11. ГРАДШТЕЙН, И. С. (1959) [1936]. ПРЯМАЯ И ОБРАТНАЯ ТЕОРЕМЫ: ЭЛЕМЕНТЫ
АЛГЕБРЫ ЛОГИКИ (https://www.mathedu.ru/text/gradshteyn_pryamaya_i_obratnaya_teore
my_1959/p0/) (in Russian) (3 ed.). МОСКВА: ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОЕ ИЗДАТЕЛЬСТВО
ФИЗИКа-МАТЕМАТИЧЕСКОЙ ЛИТЕРАТУРЫ. Translated as Gradshtein, I. S. (1963).
Direct and Converse Theorems: The Elements of Symbolic Logic. Translated by
Boddington, T. Oxford, London, New York and Paris: Pergamon Press.
12. Shannon, C. E. (1938). "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits" (https://www.c
s.virginia.edu/~evans/greatworks/shannon38.pdf) (PDF). Transactions of the American
Institute of Electrical Engineers. 57 (12): 713–723. doi:10.1109/T-AIEE.1938.5057767 (http
s://doi.org/10.1109%2FT-AIEE.1938.5057767). hdl:1721.1/11173 (https://hdl.handle.net/172
1.1%2F11173). S2CID 51638483 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:51638483).
13. Huntington, E. V. (1904). "Sets of Independent Postulates for the Algebra of Logic".
Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. 5 (3): 288–309.
14. Leibniz, G. W. (1890) [16??/17??]. Gerhardt, C. I. (ed.). Die philosophischen Schriften,
Siebter Band (https://archive.org/details/diephilosophisc01leibgoog/page/n11/mode/2up) (in
German). Berlin: Weidmann. p. 237. Retrieved 7 July 2023.
15. Huntington, E. V. (1933). "New Sets of Independent Postulates for the Algebra of Logic, With
Special Reference to Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica". Transactions of the
American Mathematical Society. 35 (1): 274–304.
16. Church, A. (1996) [1944]. Introduction to Mathematical Logic. New Jersey: Princeton
University Press. p. 37.
17. Craig, Edward (1998). Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Volume 8 (https://books.goog
le.com/books?id=mxpFwcAplaAC&pg=PA496). Taylor & Francis. p. 496. ISBN 978-0-
41507310-3.
18. Łukasiewicz, Jan (1929). Elementy logiki matematycznej [Elements of Mathematical Logic]
(in Polish) (1 ed.). Warsaw, Poland: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe.
19. Kernighan, Brian W.; Ritchie, Dennis M. (1978). "2.9: Bitwise logical operators" (https://archi
ve.org/details/TheCProgrammingLanguageFirstEdition/page/n51). The C Programming
Language. Prentice-Hall. pp. 44–46.
20. Weisstein, Eric W. "Symmetric Difference" (https://mathworld.wolfram.com/SymmetricDiffere
nce.html). MathWorld.
21. Davies, Robert B (28 February 2002). "Exclusive OR (XOR) and hardware random number
generators" (http://www.robertnz.net/pdf/xor2.pdf) (PDF). Retrieved 28 August 2013.
22. Nobel, Rickard (26 July 2011). "How RAID 5 actually works" (http://rickardnobel.se/how-raid
5-works). Retrieved 23 March 2017.

External links
All About XOR (https://accu.org/index.php/journals/1915)
Proofs of XOR properties and applications of XOR, CS103: Mathematical Foundations of
Computing, Stanford University (https://web.stanford.edu/class/archive/cs/cs103/cs103.114
2/lectures/01/Small01.pdf)

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