/InefficientFutileSearch

An incredibly inefficient attempt to factor a number that is too large to have any hope of success

Primary LanguageCGNU General Public License v3.0GPL-3.0

InefficientFutileSearch

An incredibly inefficient attempt to factor a number that is too large to have any hope of success

Many years ago, I defined Pete's Number, a 75087-digit number.

In 2021 I decided to see how far I could get factoring it. So far there are four known factors:

  • 19
  • 53
  • 25715687
  • 190528216559

I have very low hopes of finding all factors, but for some reason I've embraced the futility and am trying to at least find a fifth factor.

Learn more here

Even with an efficient algorithm, this would probably be an exercise in futility. And the efficient algorithms tend to have high storage requirements. I want something with low storage requirements and that is easy to pause/resume. I also didn't want to put a lot of time into coding this. So this is an incredibly hacky, ugly, inefficient piece of code. You should probably just turn around now.