I was wondering what big numbers are, and what are some common algorithms used to handle them. I heard this term mentioned in Coders at Work, where one was asked in an interview to create a library to work with big numbers.
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I was wondering what big numbers are, and what are some common algorithms used to handle them. I heard this term mentioned in Coders at Work, where one was asked in an interview to create a library to work with big numbers.
Big numbers are usually full-precision integers or decimals, as opposed to floating point numbers (which can also store very large numbers, but with a very limited precision). They are mostly used in cryptography. Take for example RSA keys: Those are integers with 1024 or 2048 bits (roughly 300 or 600 decimal digits). They need to be long to make it unfeasible to break the encryption using brute-force calculations.
What a library needs to provide is support to store these numbers and perform calculations on them (e.g. addition, multiplication, integer division with rest)