# Saying things rapidly about integer factorisations

Let $N$ be a positive integer. Thanks to the Miller-Rabin test and the work of Agrawal, Kayal and Saxena, these days people have much much faster algorithms for testing whether $N$ is prime or composite than they do for explicitly finding its factorisation.

If you stand at a sufficient distance, the key idea behind both Miller-Rabin and AKS (and every other primality test I've seen) is to work with the ring of residues modulo $N$, and use clever tricks to see whether it has the algebraic properties that it would have if $N$ were prime. Miller-Rabin looks to see if the roots of $1$ behave how Fermat says they should in that ring; AKS tries to verify a certain polynomial identity in it.

Are there any other properties of $N$'s factorisation that can be checked in less time than it takes to actually find that factorisation, using similar ideas? For example, is it reasonable to ask for an algorithm which takes a composite $N$ and says something useful about how many prime factors it has? This question is related to the number of square roots of $1$ in the residue ring, so might conceivably be effectively detectable by some devilishly clever trick. Similarly, the distribution of residue classes of the prime factors modulo small integers is closely related to the number of roots of unity of small orders.

Or is it simply the case that, once you know that the ring is not a field, you just have so little control over it that no good trickery is known?

I read on a webpage about squarefree integers that no such rapid algorithm is known which tests for repeated prime factors, but that doesn't seem to render the general question invalid (though, if nobody can suggest any positive results in this direction, it would lead us to guess that it's hard, perhaps).

• It took me one minute and 40 seconds to read your question out loud. I could get faster with practice, but I do not see going below a minute. – Will Jagy Aug 5 '12 at 20:52
• Scott's answer took just 52 seconds. – Will Jagy Aug 5 '12 at 20:59
• Surely this is to be expected, given that he's educating me about the subject described in the question title? – James Cranch Aug 5 '12 at 21:18
• One can rapidly decide the parity of the number (counting with multiplicity) of prime factors of $N$ that are 1 less than a multiple of 3. Ditto, 1 less than a multiple of 4. – Gerry Myerson Aug 5 '12 at 22:42
• Will, the system collapses multiple edits into one if done quickly enough. I bet it took Scott a full 2 minutes and 30 seconds to read and reply. Gerhard "Ask Me About Speed Trials" Paseman, 2012.08.05 – Gerhard Paseman Aug 6 '12 at 0:11

While the method used is not related to the work you mention in the question, there is recent work of Andrew Booker, Ghaith Hiary and Jon Keating where they develop an algorithm for determining a non trival lower bound (assuming GRH) for the square free part of the number $N$, i.e. if
$$N=\Delta m^2,$$ where $\Delta$ is square free they obtain a lower bound for $\log \Delta$, by using the Weil explicit formula for certain $L$-functions associated to $N$. I do not find the relevant paper (in progress?), but there is a slide on Hiary's homepage http://www.maths.bristol.ac.uk/~maxgh/ from a talk he has given on the topic (that I attended). In particular they manage to show that assuming the Riemann hypothesis for the relevant Dirichlet L-functions, RSA-210 is not square-full (there exists at least one prime factor in the factorization of RSA-210 that occurs just once), a number that has yet to be factored, so for example it can not be of the form $p^2q^3$. Of course it is likely to be a product of just two prime factors, but we do not yet have a proof of that.