Rational Sieve - Limitations of The Algorithm

Limitations of The Algorithm

The rational sieve, like the general number field sieve, cannot factor numbers of the form pm, where p is a prime and m is an integer. This is not a huge problem, though—such numbers are statistically rare, and moreover there is a simple and fast process to check whether a given number is of this form. Probably the most elegant method is to check whether holds for any 1 < b < log(n) using an integer version of Newton's method for the root extraction.

The biggest problem is finding a sufficient number of z such that both z and z+n are B-smooth. For any given B, the proportion of numbers that are B-smooth decreases rapidly with the size of the number. So if n is large (say, a hundred digits), it will be difficult or impossible to find enough z for the algorithm to work. The advantage of the general number field sieve is that one need only search for smooth numbers of order n1/d for some positive integer d (typically 3 or 5), rather than of order n as required here.