Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.
@PeterTaylor your answer explains why it is logically incorrect for me to conclude that efficiently determining primality implies one can efficiently determine factorization. However, my intuition is still bothered by the observation.
@TimothyChow I remember having a similar conversation with you on Usenet a long time ago. As I recall, you gave the game Hex (or maybe someone else on the thread gave it?) as an example of such a problem. There is a winning strategy but it is too big to even specify and thus intractable to find. However, with factorization the factor is not too big to specify unlike Hex.