Question

Who wants to help me with my homework?

I’m try to implement Fermat’s primality test in Java using BigIntegers. My implementation is as follows, but unfortunately it doesn’t work. Any ideas?

public static boolean checkPrime(BigInteger n, int maxIterations)
{
    if (n.equals(BigInteger.ONE))
        return false;

    BigInteger a;
    Random rand = new Random();

    for (int i = 0; i < maxIterations; i++)
    {
        a = new BigInteger(n.bitLength() - 1, rand);
        a = a.modPow(n.subtract(BigInteger.ONE), n);

        if (!a.equals(BigInteger.ONE))
            return false;
    }

    return true;
}

I’m new to BigIntegers.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Your use of the particular BigInteger constructor is reasonable, but you should use a rejection method to select a fermat base a. Here is a slight modification of your method in a class which also uses exactly one Random object:

import java.math.BigInteger;
import java.util.Random;

public class FermatTestExample
{

    private final static Random rand = new Random();

    private static BigInteger getRandomFermatBase(BigInteger n)
    {
        // Rejection method: ask for a random integer but reject it if it isn't
        // in the acceptable set.

        while (true)
        {
            final BigInteger a = new BigInteger (n.bitLength(), rand);
            // must have 1 <= a < n
            if (BigInteger.ONE.compareTo(a) <= 0 && a.compareTo(n) < 0)
            {
                return a;
            }
        }
    }

    public static boolean checkPrime(BigInteger n, int maxIterations)
    {
        if (n.equals(BigInteger.ONE))
            return false;

        for (int i = 0; i < maxIterations; i++)
        {
            BigInteger a = getRandomFermatBase(n);
            a = a.modPow(n.subtract(BigInteger.ONE), n);

            if (!a.equals(BigInteger.ONE))
                return false;
        }

        return true;
    }

    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        System.out.printf("checkprime(2) is %b%n", checkPrime(BigInteger.valueOf(2L), 20));
        System.out.printf("checkprime(5) is %b%n", checkPrime(BigInteger.valueOf(5L), 20));
        System.out.printf("checkprime(7) is %b%n", checkPrime(BigInteger.valueOf(7L), 20));
        System.out.printf("checkprime(9) is %b%n", checkPrime(BigInteger.valueOf(9L), 20));
    }
}