findafactor 5.1.1

Find any nontrivial factor of a number

FindAFactor

Find any nontrivial factor of a number

Copyright and license

(c) Daniel Strano and the Qrack contributors 2017-2025. All rights reserved.

Installation

From PyPi:

pip3 install FindAFactor

From Source: install pybind11, then

pip3 install .

in the root source directory (with setup.py).

Windows users might find Windows Subsystem Linux (WSL) to be the easier and preferred choice for installation.

Usage

from FindAFactor import find_a_factor, FactoringMethod

to_factor = 1000

factor = find_a_factor(
    to_factor,
    method=FactoringMethod.PRIME_SOLVER,
    node_count=1, node_id=0,
    gear_factorization_level=11,
    wheel_factorization_level=11,
    sieving_bound_multiplier=1.0,
    smoothness_bound_multiplier=1.0,
    gaussian_elimination_row_multiplier=1.2,
    check_small_factors=False
)

The find_a_factor() function should return any nontrivial factor of to_factor (that is, any factor besides 1 or to_factor) if it exists. If a nontrivial factor does not exist (i.e., the number to factor is prime), the function will return 1 or the original to_factor.

• method (default value: PRIME_SOLVER/0): PRIME_SOLVER/0 will prove that a number is prime (by failing to find any factors with wheel and gear factorization). FACTOR_FINDER/1 is optimized for the assumption that the number has at least two nontrivial factors.
• node_count (default value: 1): FindAFactor can perform factorization in a distributed manner, across nodes, without network communication! When node_count is set higher than 1, the search space for factors is segmented equally per node. If the number to factor is semiprime, and brute-force search is used instead of congruence of squares, for example, all nodes except the one that happens to contain the (unknown) prime factor less than the square root of to_factor will ultimately return 1, while one node will find and return this factor. For best performance, every node involved in factorization should have roughly the same CPU throughput capacity. For FACTOR_FINDER mode, this splits the sieving range between nodes, but it does not actually coordinate Gaussian elimination rows between nodes.
• node_id (default value: 0): This is the identifier of this node, when performing distributed factorization with node_count higher than 1. node_id values start at 0 and go as high as (node_count - 1).
• gear_factorization_level (default value: 1): This is the value up to which "wheel (and gear) factorization" are applied to "brute force." A value of 11 includes all prime factors of 11 and below and works well for PRIME_PROVER, though significantly higher might be preferred in certain cases.
• wheel_factorization_level (default value: 1): "Wheel" vs. "gear" factorization balances two types of factorization wheel ("wheel" vs. "gear" design) that often work best when the "wheel" is only a few prime number levels lower than gear factorization. Optimized implementation for wheels is only available up to 13. The primes above "wheel" level, up to "gear" level, are the primes used specifically for "gear" factorization. Wheel factorization is also applied to "peturb" FACTOR_FINDER mode into non-multiples on the wheel, if the level is set above 1 (which might not actually work, but we leave it for your experimentation).
• sieving_bound_multiplier (default value: 1.0): This controls the sieving bound and is calibrated such that it linearly multiplies the square root of the number to factor (for each 1.0 increment). While this might be a huge bound, remember that sieving termination is primarily controlled by when gaussian_elimination_row_multiplier is exactly satisfied.
• smoothness_bound_multiplier (default value: 1.0): This controls smoothness bound and is calibrated such that it linearliy multiplies exp(0.5 * std::sqrt(log(N) * log(log(N)))) for N being the number to factor (for each 1.0 increment). This was a heuristic suggested by Elara (an OpenAI custom GPT).
• gaussian_elimination_row_multiplier (default value: 1.0): This controls the number of rows sieved for Gaussian elimination before terminating the sieve and is calibrated such that it linearly multiplies one plus the number of smooth prime columns in the Gaussian elimination matrix (for each 1.0 increment). So long as this setting is appropriately low enough, sieving_bound_multiplier can be set basically arbitrarily high.
• check_small_factors (default value: False): True performs initial-phase trial division up to the smoothness bound, and False skips it.

All variables defaults can also be controlled by environment variables:

• FINDAFACTOR_METHOD (integer value)
• FINDAFACTOR_NODE_COUNT
• FINDAFACTOR_NODE_ID
• FINDAFACTOR_GEAR_FACTORIZATION_LEVEL
• FINDAFACTOR_WHEEL_FACTORIZATION_LEVEL
• FINDAFACTOR_SIEVING_BOUND_MULTIPLIER
• FINDAFACTOR_SMOOTHNESS_BOUND_MULTIPLIER
• FINDAFACTOR_GAUSSIAN_ELIMINATION_ROW_MULTIPLIER
• FINDAFACTOR_CHECK_SMALL_FACTORS (True if set at all, otherwise False)

About

This library was originally called "Qimcifa" and demonstrated a (Shor's-like) "quantum-inspired" algorithm for integer factoring. It has since been developed into a general factoring algorithm and tool.

Special thanks to OpenAI GPT "Elara," for help with indicated region of contributed code!