Quote:
Originally Posted by xilman
It appears to be a variant on Pollard rho and you should analyze the map f(x) -> x^x for its cycle behaviour.
|
Which reminds me of a crazy idea I had about 15 years ago.
Pollard rho is essentially searching for cycles mod p in a "random" mapping from Z_N to Z_N.
Multiplication in Z_N is expensive without specialized hardware. However, specialized hardware existed back then for doing DES encryption and DES was designed to perform a random mapping (conspiracy theories aside) so ...
Nothing came of it, of course, it would have been faster than regular rho by at most a constant factor, and I could see no way of exploiting constraints on the form of any factors.
Paul