Welcome to the XYYXF project!
Home
News
How?

Status
Results
Records
Primes

Contributors
Join us!
Reserve

Links
Contact
  Integer factorization is one of the most interesting things in computational number theory. First of all it is closely related to cryptography, that's why large networks spend months of CPU-time on cracking crypto-keys and number theorists invent new factoring algorithms trying to factor numbers of some kind. One of the oldest factoring projects is famous Cunningham Project which deals with numbers of the form bn±1, b<13, up to large n's. Such methods as MPQS and NFS were found in attempt to split some Cunningham composites.

A number of new factoring projects has been announced since those times. Each of them concerns numbers of some special kind, therefore some special factoring methods are involved. However, it should be noticed that these numbers have one common feature: their form is suitable for quick deterministic primality tests, e.g. N±1 tests. This happens due to such a tendency that at first people use some kind of numbers to find primes, but then, after finding (or not) some primes, people begin to factor composites.

This tendency also takes place in XYYXF project. Paul Leyland was first who started the search for primes of the form xy + yx, some people joined this search later. But numbers of the form xy + yx are not suitable for fast deterministic primality tests, they are not cyclotomic and may not be easily represented in another algebraic forms to make them factorable with known fast algorithms. At the same time, their factors sometimes have special form. This project coordinates people to improve factoring methods in different ways, or even to find some new algorithms...


Back to the top

Andrey Kulsha, Belarus