So I accidentally reinvented Pollard's algorithm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Fuuuuuuuuu.....

Also products of Sophie Germain primes seem trivial to break.

Divide the product by 2.

Square root the result and floor it.

I must be missing something.

Taking reinventing the wheel to a new level...

Yeah, reinventing stuff feels good and bad at the same time. Bad because someone already did it before you, but good because it's a confirmation of your work and thinking - you did something meaningful.

I accidentally reinvented the WKBJ method in physics. I was hyped because I invented something important and meaningful, until I realized it not only already existed, but that I already knew about it (I came to it in a slightly different way though).

@Quirinus

hey cool! Just learned about the WKBJ method thanks to you.

It's amazing how much interesting knowledge and ideas fail to get passed on and have to be stumbled on by people still learning.

I also attempted aproximation by square roots to reduce the search space. Kinda works.

Problem is you end up having to deal with decimals.

And you can iterate individual decimal digits, generate a set of values based on each iteration and try to find the closest to the products actual root, but theres local minima all over the place, which means you end up just having to go through fractional increments the way you'd do anything: by brute forcing.

If you take the root of the product P, and then the root of the root though, it DOES make brute forcing simpler.

Not enough to make a difference.

I'm looking at a combination of finding the nearest aproximation of the smallest factor beneath the root of the product by taking the root of the root and brute forcing it, and iterating digit by digit (N*10, rather than 10^N) through the fractional part of the root in question.