Fastest way to determine if an integer's square root is an integer

Question

I\'m looking for the fastest way to determine if a long value is a perfect square (i.e. its square root is another integer):

1. I\'ve done it the ea

Answer 1

It ought to be possible to pack the 'cannot be a perfect square if the last X digits are N' much more efficiently than that! I'll use java 32 bit ints, and produce enough data to check the last 16 bits of the number - that's 2048 hexadecimal int values.

...

Ok. Either I have run into some number theory that is a little beyond me, or there is a bug in my code. In any case, here is the code:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    final int BITS = 16;

    BitSet foo = new BitSet();

    for(int i = 0; i< (1<

and here are the results:

(ed: elided for poor performance in prettify.js; view revision history to see.)