Using Simulated Annealing to Factor Numbers

Abstract

Almost all public secure communication relies on the inability to factor large numbers. There is no known analytic or classical numeric method to rapidly factor large numbers. Shor[1] has shown that a quantum computer can factor numbers in polynomial time but there is no practical quantum computer that can yet do such computations. We show that a simulated annealing[2] approach can be adapted to find factors of large numbers.