Question

1. How does mod of power of 2 work on only lower order bits of a binary number (1011000111011010)?
2. What is this number mod 2 to power 0, 2 to power 4?
3. What does power of 2 have to do with the modulo operator? Does it hold a special property?
4. Can someone give me an example?

The instructor says “When you take something mod to power of 2 you just take its lower order bits”. I was too afraid to ask what he meant =)

Answer 1

He meant that taking number mod 2^n is equivalent to stripping off all but the n lowest-order (right-most) bits of number.

For example, if n == 2,

number      number mod 4
00000001      00000001
00000010      00000010
00000011      00000011
00000100      00000000
00000101      00000001
00000110      00000010
00000111      00000011
00001000      00000000
00001001      00000001
etc.

So in other words, number mod 4 is the same as number & 00000011 (where & means bitwise-and)

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Note that this works exactly the same in base-10: number mod 10 gives you the last digit of the number in base-10, number mod 100 gives you the last two digits, etc.