Usually, we expect that negating a number yields a number which is of the same absolute value, but with a flipped sign. However, there is a curious behaviour in many programming languages where this property does not hold for one special case. You might have come across this if you (like me) tried to (mis)use a constant Integer.MIN_VALUE (or somesuch) to simulate something like negative infinity. For example, this could be useful in a min-max algorithm with alpha-beta pruning.

What’s the issue?!

If you negate the lowest representable int in (for example) java, you could expect it to become Integer.MAX_VALUE. This however, is literally far from the truth! Instead, you get… Integer.MIN_VALUE again. How the flip did that happen?

In order to explain this behaviour, we have to dig a bit deeper into the way signed integer numbers are represented in memory:

Two’s Complement

If you already know how Two’s Complement works, just skip this. If not, here is a short explanation:

In order to represent both positive and negative numbers, we need to somehow account for the sign of the number we are representing. This can be done in multiple ways, but Two’s Complement has emerged as the most successful approach. Basically, numbers are still just binary strings of bits, but the Most Significant Bit (MSB) (the bit representing the largest power of 2) counts negatively. For example, if we have the 8-bit binary number 0001 0011, 19 in decimal, everything is normal because the MSB is zero. The number 1001 0011 however would be interpreted as (-128) + 16 + 2 + 1, -109 in decimal.

Determining the sign of a number becomes very simple: if the MSB is set, the number is negative. Zero is represented as 0000 0000, negative one as 1111 1111 (the other 7 bits are needed to offset the large ‘negative weight’), and the largest positive number is 0111 1111.

Negating a Number in Two’s Complement and Ranges of Representable Numbers

The lowest representable number in Two’s Complement is 2^(Place of MSB), while the largest number is only 2^(Place of MSB) - 1. That is because the positive numbers also need to include zero.

Negating a number in Two’s Complement is easy using this ‘hand rule’: start at the right (Least Significant Bit LSB) and copy all zeroes and the first one. Then, invert the rest.

Bringing it together

Now we have everything that is needed to understand the behaviour shown above where -a = a (with ‘a’ being some negative number). There are actually at least two ways to understand it, the first one involving the display range and the other involving the ‘hand rule’.

If you invert the lowest representable number with the hand rule, you don’t find a ‘1’ until the very end. That means, you copy it and don’t invert anything! Or, using number ranges: the positive range is one less than the negative range, which means that the lowest number simply cannot be inverted without exactly one overflow! Which means, we end up at the place we started.