HP 41C Pollard Brent Integer Factorization

[Joe Horn]

POBR takes 1.5 minutes to factor 503*509, whereas the brute-force NP program in the PPC ROM takes only 1 minute. This is very strange, since it seems to me that no method should take longer than brute-force trial and error.

Also, POBR never seems to finish with even moderate-sized inputs, such as 991*997.

Is this expected, or evidence of a bug? (I double-checked to be sure that I keyed your programs in correctly.)