for Dave Britten--get well soon

[Don Shepherd]

(05-11-2014 03:32 AM)Dave Britten Wrote:  I didn't study enough number theory in college to be able to provide an exhaustive deconstruction of the algorithm, but I think it perfectly captures the spirit of these kinds of calculators and computers: being able to strike the perfect balance between hardware resources and algorithmic complexity in order to provide genuine efficiency gains without losing sight of the problem domain.

I agree. The algorithm eliminates all multiples of 2, 3, and 5 from the pool of trial factors. I modified it for the 32sii to also eliminate all multiples of 7, but that actually increased the runtime for the numbers I tested with, because the list of trial factor increments is much longer and this causes program branches to take more time. So this algorithm, for this type of approach, is tuned perfectly.