--- Begin Message ---
Subject: |
Composites identified as primes in factor.c (when HAVE_GMP) |
Date: |
Tue, 04 Sep 2012 15:09:53 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.3 (berkeley-unix) |
The very old factoring code cut from an now obsolete version GMP does
not pass proper arguments to the mpz_probab_prime_p function. It ask
for 3 Miller-Rabin tests only, which is not sufficient.
I am afraid the original poor code was wrritten by me, where this
particular problem was introduced with 3.0's demos/factorize.c.
A Miller-Rabin test will detect composites with at least a probability
of 3/4. For a uniform random composite, the probability will actually
by much higher.
Or put another way, of the N-3 possible Miller-Rabin tests for checking
the composite N, there is no number N for which more than (N-3)/4 of the
tests will fail to detect the number as a composite. For most numbers N
the number of "false witnesses" will be much, much lower.
Problem numbers are of the for N=pq, p,q prime and (p-1)/(q-1) = s,
where s is a small integer. (There are other problem forms too,
incvolving 3 or more prime factors.) When s = 2, we get the 3/4 factor.
It is easy to find numbers of that form that causes coreutils factor to
fail:
465658903
2242724851
6635692801
17709149503
17754345703
20889169003
42743470771
54890944111
72047131003
85862644003
98275842811
114654168091
117225546301
...
There are 9008992 composites of the form with s=2 below 2^64. With 3
Miller-Rabin test, one would expect about 9008992/4^64 = 140766 to be
invalidly recognised as primes in that range.
Here is a simple patch:
diff
Description: Binary data
I and Niels Möller have written a suggested replacement for coreutils
factor.c. It fixes a number of issues with the current code:
(1) Much faster trial division code (> 10x) based on a small table of
prime inverses. Still, the new code doesn't perform lots of trial
dividing.
(2) Pollard rho code using Montgomery representation for numbers < 2^64.
(We consider extending this to 128 bits.) Not dependent on GMP.
(3) Lucas prime proving code instead of probablitic Miller-Rabin primes
testing.
(4) SQUFOF code, which might be included depending on performance
issues.
(5) Replacement GMP code (#if HAVE_GMP) that also includes Lucas proving
code.
The new code is faster than the current code:
Old:
seq `pexpr 2^64-1000` `pexpr 2^64-1` | time factor >/dev/null
524.57 user
New:
seq `pexpr 2^64-1000` `pexpr 2^64-1` | time ./factor >/dev/null
0.05 user
For smaller number ranges, the improvements are currently much more
modest, as little as 2x in some cases.
The code should be ready within a few weeks.
--
Torbjörn
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--- Begin Message ---
Subject: |
Re: bug#12350: Composites identified as primes in factor.c (when HAVE_GMP) |
Date: |
Sun, 07 Oct 2012 11:00:55 +0200 |
Torbjorn Granlund wrote:
> Jim Meyering <address@hidden> writes:
>
> How about this in place of the final sentence?
>
> The new program also
> runs a deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just
> a probabilistic test.
>
> That's better, thanks.
I pushed the actual bug fix (for the issue mentioned in the Subject)
long ago, so I'm closing this "issue".
Regarding your upcoming improvements, please start a new thread
when you're ready to discuss them, so that your comments are not
lost in the volume of with this now-"done" bug report.
Thanks again,
Jim
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