Special number field sieve
In number theory, a branch of mathematics, the special number field sieve (SNFS) is a special-purpose integer factorization algorithm. The general number field sieve (GNFS) was derived from it.
The special number field sieve is efficient for integers of the form re ± s, where r and s are small (for instance Mersenne numbers).
Heuristically, its complexity for factoring an integer is of the form:
in O and L-notations.
The SNFS has been used extensively by NFSNet (a volunteer distributed computing effort), NFS@Home and others to factorise numbers of the Cunningham project; for some time the records for integer factorisation have been numbers factored by SNFS.
The SNFS is based on an idea similar to the much simpler rational sieve; in particular, readers may find it helpful to read about the rational sieve first, before tackling the SNFS.
The SNFS works as follows. Let n be the integer we want to factor. As in the rational sieve, the SNFS can be broken into two steps:
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