How can I safely average two unsigned ints in C++?

Question

Using integer math alone, I\'d like to \"safely\" average two unsigned ints in C++.

What I mean by \"safely\" is avoiding overflows (and anything else that can be th

Answer 1

What you have is fine, with the minor detail that it will claim that the average of 3 and 3 is 2. I'm guessing that you don't want that; fortunately, there's an easy fix:

unsigned int average = a/2 + b/2 + (a & b & 1);

This just bumps the average back up in the case that both divisions were truncated.