= Bit parallelism
= Bit-parallel
{synonym}
<Bit parallelism> represents many Boolean states in the bits of a machine <word> and updates them together with <bitwise operations>. For example, if a bit at position $j$ records whether sum $j$ is reachable, adding an item of weight $w$ updates the state mask to `mask | (mask << w)`, retaining old sums and adding shifted ones. A fixed-width operation processes up to the word width in parallel. An arbitrary-precision <integer> spanning many words still costs time proportional to the affected storage; using one language-level <integer> does not make every operation constant-time.
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