  Let x, y be strings of equal length. The Hamming distance h(x,y) between x
and y is the number of positions in which x and y differ. If x is a cyclic
shift of y, we say x and y are conjugates. We consider f(x,y), the Hamming
distance between the conjugates xy and yx. Over a binary alphabet f(x,y) is
always even, and must satisfy a further technical condition. By contrast, over
an alphabet of size 3 or greater, f(x,y) can take any value between 0 and
|x|+|y|, except 1; furthermore, we can always assume that the smaller string
has only one type of letter.
