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I found this program msieve.exe that does Quadratic Seive Factoring of arbitrary integers and I wonder if there is time enough to put together a brute force solution to the Weird Number quiz before the summary comes out. The basic idea would be to find the prime factors of successive integers using the output msieve.exe and testing for abundance and weirdness based on these factors. Is there any rule on the Quiz the prevents helper codes from being used? The Quadratic Seive is the fastest algorithm known for factoring integers with less than 110 digits. In the search for Weird Numbers the speed of the Quadratic Seive factoring of sufficiently large numbers will probably overcome the repeated system calls and text parsing of the output.
   
  Here is the Ruby code that will factor 2_138_723_987 in the blink of an eye into a 2 two digit (p2 token) and a seven digit (prp7 token) factors:
   
  irb(main):010:0> puts `msieve -q 2138723987`
  2138723987
p2: 29
p2: 37
prp7: 1993219
  nil
  
check: 2_138_723_987  9 * 37 * 1_993_219
   
  Here is the program:
   
  http://www.boo.net/~jasonp/qs.html
   
  and here is a summary of the theory:
   
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_sieve
   
  Here are the switches for controlling msieve:
   
  msieve -h displays command options:
   
  C:\DOCUME~1\OWNER\DESKTOP>msieve -h
  Msieve v. 1.03
  usage: MSIEVE [options] [one_number]
  options:
   -s <name> save intermediate results to <name>
             instead of the default msieve.dat
   -l <name> append log information to <name>
             instead of the default msieve.log
   -i <name> read one or more integers to factor from
             <name> (default worktodo.ini) instead of
             from the command line
   -m        manual mode: enter numbers via standard input
   -q        quiet: do not generate any log information,
             only print any factors found
   -d <min>  deadline: if still sieving after <min>
             minutes, shut down gracefully (default off)
   -r <num>  stop after finding <num> relations
   -c        client: only perform sieving
   -v        verbose: write log information to screen
             as well as to logfile
   
  Here is a list of 15 million prime numbers that might be helpful checking computations:
   
  http://primes.utm.edu/lists/small/millions/

			
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