RE : crazy run-time fluctuations (mostly super-slow) -- a bit more data

Hi Laurent,

true, I forgot about that randomness here. Setting save_primes to true seems to have
no influence (or not a big influence) on run-times. 

Now I tried to store the Lisp-variable

random-state

to make the Lisp-function random reproducible, but the short documentation
on "Lisp and Maxima" is very cryptic: It doesn't say explicitly how
to use Lisp from Maxima, it only gives some hints. So I didn't get
that working --- how can I save the variable random-state and set
it later to that stored valued in a Maxima-session?

Thanks for your help.

Oliver

P.S. I tried to use
:lisp (let (var random-state))
and variations, but I got cryptic error messages.

Not even

(%i1) :lisp(random-state-p random-state)

Maxima encountered a Lisp error:

 The variable RANDOM-STATE is unbound.

works?
Also

(%i1) :lisp(random-state-p 'random-state)

NIL

fails (according to http://www.ida.liu.se/imported/cltl/clm/node133.html
it should return true or false, and in this case it should be true).

> Hi,
> 
> I don't know more about the algorithms to factor integer but it seems Pollard's rho, Pollard's
> p-1 and elliptic curve algorithms use some kind of random search. Then it seems not so much
> surprising if computation time can change.
> Taking a look at ifactor.lisp it seems there is an undocumented switch save_primes.
> Maybe this can help you to speed up the things.
> Probably the function ifactor is not a good one to check "stability" of the underlying lisp.
> 
> Hope This help.
> 
> Laurent.
>