Project Euler Question 3 Help

Question

I\'m trying to work through Project Euler and I\'m hitting a barrier on problem 03. I have an algorithm that works for smaller numbers, but problem 3 uses a very, very large

Answer 1

This solution on C++ took 3.7 ms on my Intel Quad Core i5 iMac (3.1 GHz)

#include 
#include 
#include 

using std::sqrt; using std::cin;
using std::cout; using std::endl;

long lpf(long n)
{
  long start = (sqrt(n) + 2 % 2);
  if(start % 2 == 0) start++;

  for(long i = start; i != 2; i -= 2)
    {
      if(n % i == 0) //then i is a factor of n                                                
        {
          long j = 2L;
          do {
              ++j;
             }
          while(i % j != 0 && j <= i);

          if(j == i) //then i is a prime number                                           
            return i;
        }
    }
}

int main()
{
  long n, ans;
  cout << "Please enter your number: ";
  cin >> n; //600851475143L                                                               

  time_t start, end;
  time(&start);
  int i;
  for(i = 0; i != 3000; ++i)
      ans = lpf(n);
  time(&end);

  cout << "The largest prime factor of your number is: " << ans << endl;
  cout << "Running time: " << 1000*difftime(end, start)/i << " ms." << endl;

  return 0;
}