Re: Surrogate factoring demonstrated

From: Tim Peters (tim.one_at_comcast.net)
Date: 02/26/05 

Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 21:34:11 -0500

[Décio Luiz Gazzoni Filho, to JSH]
> ...
> I won't go away. As long as I see an interesting avenue to attack a
> problem that you stumbled upon (in the sense that a person stumbles
> upon things in a dark room), I'm going to post about it. You're free
> to ignore it, as you have been doing with everyone who tried to help
> you, but I never cared about your opinion anyway. To the extent that
> others are finding my posts interesting (Tim sure seems to), I feel
> that they're useful.

Oh yes! But I don't factor integers for a living <wink>, and in fact none
of this has any connection to my day job. It's recreational posting for me,
and I'm no expert in current factoring research. One reason I've enjoyed
your posts so much is that they gave me a bit of insight into how someone
much more current in the field approaches the kinds of algorithmic issues
that arise. That's educational, and the math was darned pretty. Alas, the
number of people with earnest interest in a field who still slog thru JSH
threads is ever decreasing, so it's possible that the few of us remaining in
this thread are just writing for each other. That's OK.

> You remind me of this article I read on PopSci about the worst jobs in
> science. You're like a guy who sticks his ass on a cow's behind to
> collect some samples, so the real researchers (like Tim and Rick and I)
> can do our experiments without getting our hands dirty.

Na, I'm not a "real researcher" here -- the kind of testing I've done here
amounts to finger exercises. It's relaxing, and some of the programming
challenges have been stimulating fun, but that's it. Rick Decker was doing
real research on JSH's equations, and if JSH had continued talking with him
I expect there would have been no theoretical questions of real interest
remaining by now (you may not have noticed this, but James is sometimes a
wee bit sensitive to claims that part of the work is imperfect <heh>). Nora
Baron has been doing real research on simpler approaches, taking off from
that there's no bound to the number of equations one _could_ start from
instead. You've done the only real research here on O() behavior for this
kind of algorithm, and how to improve it -- and your first few posts on
those topics appeared to nail the essential answers.

All of those surprised and delighted me at times. Then again, I'm easily
entertained <wink>.

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