Boolean Algebra Simplifier

This calculator estimates how far a sum-of-products Boolean expression could shrink under Quine-McCluskey-style grouping, without running the real Quine-McCluskey algorithm on an actual truth table. When the Minterms Bitmask is left at 0, it has no idea which specific minterms your expression actually contains — it simply substitutes the Number of Minterms count in their place and then greedily assumes the largest possible power-of-two groupings are achievable, working from the biggest group size down to the smallest. That's an optimistic best case, not a guarantee: a real expression whose active minterms don't happen to form neat power-of-two clusters would simplify by less than this estimate suggests, sometimes considerably less. This page never accounts for the actual adjacency of minterms, on either path: the Minterms Bitmask is read in exactly one place, a bit-count loop that produces activeMinterms, and the specific bit positions that are set are never inspected again after that — the greedy grouping loop that follows consumes only the resulting count, identically whether that count came from the bitmask or was supplied directly as a bare Number of Minterms.

Supplying the bitmask changes nothing about how adjacency is treated; it's just an alternate way to specify the same single number. The greedy grouping loop also still doesn't verify that a claimed reduction produces a functionally correct simplified expression, only a term and literal count. Nudging Number of Variables or Number of Minterms by a small percentage at the calculator's defaults doesn't visibly change the result at all, purely because both are small whole numbers — 3 and 4 — that a ten percent wiggle isn't large enough to round past, not because either input is actually unimportant to the estimate.