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copied!<p>There are a <strong>lot</strong> more techniques to factoring than the sieve of Atkin. For example suppose we want to factor 5893. Well its sqrt is 76.76... Now we'll try to write 5893 as a product of squares. Well (77*77 - 5893) = 36 which is 6 squared, so 5893 = 77*77 - 6*6 = (77 + 6)(77-6) = 83*71. If that hadn't worked we'd have looked at whether 78*78 - 5893 was a perfect square. And so on. With this technique you can quickly test for factors near the square root of n much faster than by testing individual primes. If you combine this technique for ruling out large primes with a sieve, you will have a much better factoring method than with the sieve alone.</p> <p>And this is just one of a large number of techniques that have been developed. This is a fairly simple one. It would take you a long time to learn, say, enough number theory to understand the factoring techniques based on elliptic curves. (I know they exist. I don't understand them.)</p> <p>Therefore unless you are dealing with small integers, I wouldn't try to solve that problem myself. Instead I'd try to find a way to use something like the <a href="http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~algorith/implement/pari/implement.shtml" rel="noreferrer">PARI</a> library that already has a highly efficient solution implemented. With that I can factor a random 40 digit number like 124321342332143213122323434312213424231341 in about .05 seconds. (Its factorization, in case you wondered, is 29*439*1321*157907*284749*33843676813*4857795469949. I am quite confident that it didn't figure this out using the sieve of Atkin...)</p>

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