Shanks' square forms factorization
Shanks's square forms factorization is a method for integer factorization devised by Daniel Shanks as an improvement on Fermat's factorization method.
The success of Fermat's method depends on finding integers and such that , where is the integer to be factored. An improvement (noticed by Kraitchik) is to look for integers and such that . Finding a suitable pair does not guarantee a factorization of , but it implies that is a factor of , and there is a good chance that the prime divisors of are distributed between these two factors, so that calculation of the greatest common divisor of and will give a non-trivial factor of .
A practical algorithm for finding pairs which satisfy was developed by Shanks, who named it Square Forms Factorization or SQUFOF. The algorithm can be expressed in terms of continued fractions or in terms of quadratic forms. Although there are now much more efficient factorization methods available, SQUFOF has the advantage that it is small enough to be implemented on a programmable calculator.
Algorithm
Input: , the integer to be factored, which must be neither a prime number nor a perfect square, and a small multiplier .
Output: a non-trivial factor of .
The algorithm:
Initialize
Repeat
until is a perfect square at some even .
Initialize
Repeat
until
Then if is not equal to and not equal to , then is a non-trivial factor of . Otherwise try another value of .
Shanks's method has time complexity .
Stephen S. McMath (see link in External Link section) wrote a more detailed discussion of the mathematics of Shanks's method, together with a proof of its correctness.
Example
Let
Cycle forward | |||
---|---|---|---|
Here is a perfect square.
Reverse cycle | |||
---|---|---|---|
Here .
, which is a factor of .
Thus,
Implementations
The PSIQS Java package contains a SquFoF implementation.
Example implementations
Below is an example of C function for performing SQUFOF factorization on unsigned integer not larger than 64 bits, without overflow of the transient operations.
#include <inttypes.h>
#define nelems(x) (sizeof(x) / sizeof((x)[0]))
const int multiplier[] = {1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 3*5, 3*7, 3*11, 5*7, 5*11, 7*11, 3*5*7, 3*5*11, 3*7*11, 5*7*11, 3*5*7*11};
uint64_t SQUFOF( uint64_t N )
{
uint64_t D, Po, P, Pprev, Q, Qprev, q, b, r, s;
uint32_t L, B, i;
s = (uint64_t)(sqrtl(N)+0.5);
if (s*s == N) return s;
for (int k = 0; k < nelems(multiplier) && N <= UINT64_MAX/multiplier[k]; k++) {
D = multiplier[k]*N;
Po = Pprev = P = sqrtl(D);
Qprev = 1;
Q = D - Po*Po;
L = 2 * sqrtl( 2*s );
B = 3 * L;
for (i = 2 ; i < B ; i++) {
b = (uint64_t)((Po + P)/Q);
P = b*Q - P;
q = Q;
Q = Qprev + b*(Pprev - P);
r = (uint64_t)(sqrtl(Q)+0.5);
if (!(i & 1) && r*r == Q) break;
Qprev = q;
Pprev = P;
};
if (i >= B) continue;
b = (uint64_t)((Po - P)/r);
Pprev = P = b*r + P;
Qprev = r;
Q = (D - Pprev*Pprev)/Qprev;
i = 0;
do {
b = (uint64_t)((Po + P)/Q);
Pprev = P;
P = b*Q - P;
q = Q;
Q = Qprev + b*(Pprev - P);
Qprev = q;
i++;
} while (P != Pprev);
r = gcd(N, Qprev);
if (r != 1 && r != N) return r;
}
return 0;
}
References
- D. A. Buell (1989). Binary Quadratic Forms. Springer-Verlag. ISBN 0-387-97037-1.
- D. M. Bressoud (1989). Factorisation and Primality Testing. Springer-Verlag. ISBN 0-387-97040-1.
- Riesel, Hans (1994). Prime numbers and computer methods for factorization (2nd ed.). Birkhauser. ISBN 0-8176-3743-5.
- Samuel S. Wagstaff, Jr. (2013). The Joy of Factoring. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society. pp. 163–168. ISBN 978-1-4704-1048-3.
External links
- Daniel Shanks: Analysis and Improvement of the Continued Fraction Method of Factorization, (transcribed by S. McMath 2004)
- Daniel Shanks: SQUFOF Notes, (transcribed by S. McMath 2004)
- Stephen McMath: Daniel Shanks’s Square Forms Factorization (Nov. 2004)
- Stephen S. McMath: Parallel integer factorization using quadratic forms, 2005
- S. McMath, F. Crabbe, D. Joyner: Continued fractions and parallel SQUFOF, 2005
- Jason Gower, Samuel Wagstaff: Square Form Factorisation (Published)
- Shanks' SQUFOF Factoring Algorithm