Getting Factors of a Number

Reducing the bound of how high you have to go as you could knowingly stop at the square root of the number, though this does carry the caution of picking out squares that would have the odd number of factors, but it does help reduce how often the loop has to be executed.

The first thing to notice is that it suffices to find all of the prime factors. Once you have these it's easy to find the number of total divisors: for each prime, add 1 to the number of times it appears and multiply these together. So for 12 = 2 * 2 * 3 you have (2 + 1) * (1 + 1) = 3 * 2 = 6 factors.

The next thing follows from the first: when you find a factor, divide it out so that the resulting number is smaller. When you combine this with the fact that you need only check to the square root of the current number this is a huge improvement. For example, consider N = 10714293844487412. Naively it would take N steps. Checking up to its square root takes sqrt(N) or about 100 million steps. But since the factors 2, 2, 3, and 953 are discovered early on you actually only need to check to one million -- a 100x improvement!

Another improvement: you don't need to check every number to see if it divides your number, just the primes. If it's more convenient you can use 2 and the odd numbers, or 2, 3, and the numbers 6n-1 and 6n+1 (a basic wheel sieve).

Here's another nice improvement. If you can quickly determine whether a number is prime, you can reduce the need for division even further. Suppose, after removing small factors, you have 120528291333090808192969. Even checking up to its square root will take a long time -- 300 billion steps. But a Miller-Rabin test (very fast -- maybe 10 to 20 nanoseconds) will show that this number is composite. How does this help? It means that if you check up to its cube root and find no factors, then there are exactly two primes left. If the number is a square, its factors are prime; if the number is not a square, the numbers are distinct primes. This means you can multiply your 'running total' by 3 or 4, respectively, to get the final answer -- even without knowing the factors! This can make more of a difference than you'd guess: the number of steps needed drops from 300 billion to

Well if you are going to use this function a lot you can use modified algorithm of Eratosthenes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_of_Eratosthenes and store answars for a interval 1 to Max in array. It will run IntializeArray() once and after it will return answers in 0(1).

const int Max =1000000;
int arr [] = new int [Max+1];

public void InitializeArray()
{
    for(int i=1;i<=Max;++i)
        arr[i]=1;//1 is factor for everyone

    for(int i=2;i<=Max;++i)
        for(int j=i;i<=Max;i+=j)
           ++arr[j];
}
public int GetHowManyFactors(int numberToCheck)
{
   return arr[numberToCheck];
}

But if you are not going to use this function a lot I think best solution is to check unitll square root.

Note: I have corrected my code!

An easy to implement algorithm that will bring you much farther than trial division is Pollard Rho

Here is a Java implementation, that should be easy to adapt to C#: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/introcs/78crypto/PollardRho.java.html