Time it takes to select polynomials for 154 digits

[Batalov]

...but somewhere on par with minesweeper™.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by sean

Factoring is certainly more fun and more rewarding than solitaire :-)

When Bob first drew my attention to the concept, the first thought that came to mind was that blindly running others' code without making any attempt to improve it or to optimize input parameters or, even, to select your own class of integers to factor was almost exactly like Solitaire. I'm not knocking that activity, not least because I play Solitaire (the Freecell variant) when I've nothing better to do. The big difference though (and I hadn't thought about this until just now) is that you are marginally more credible when boasting about finding a factorization than you would be if the achievement were to be solving a Solitaire game.


Paul