PBBx0's blog

By PBBx0, 3 months ago, In English

Few people know, but UNIX-like operating systems have a built-in ‘factor’ function that is used to... factorize numbers (surprise surprise). And it does it extremely fast. I mean incredibly fast. Just try it.

And it gives us a silly but charming way to find prime numbers: to check if a number is prime, just call ‘factor’ and make sure the result contains a single number.

With a little familiarity with bash you can write scripts for something like finding next prime or anything

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3 months ago, # |
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Just fyi, almost every factoring algorithm has a computational complexity proportional to the biggest or second biggest factor. Ironically it’s kind of hard to design an algorithm worse than that.