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<<BITS); i++) {
        int sq = (i*i);
        sq = sq & ((1<<BITS)-1);
        foo.set(sq);
    }

    System.out.println("int[] mayBeASquare = {");

    for(int i = 0; i< 1<<(BITS-5); i++) {
        int kk = 0;
        for(int j = 0; j<32; j++) {
            if(foo.get((i << 5) | j)) {
                kk |= 1<<j;
            }
        }
        System.out.print("0x" + Integer.toHexString(kk) + ", ");
        if(i%8 == 7) System.out.println();
    }
    System.out.println("};");
}

and here are the results:

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

Answer 2

You should get rid of the 2-power part of N right from the start.

2nd Edit The magical expression for m below should be

m = N - (N & (N-1));

and not as written

End of 2nd edit

m = N & (N-1); // the lawest bit of N
N /= m;
byte = N & 0x0F;
if ((m % 2) || (byte !=1 && byte !=9))
  return false;

1st Edit:

Minor improvement:

m = N & (N-1); // the lawest bit of N
N /= m;
if ((m % 2) || (N & 0x07 != 1))
  return false;

End of 1st edit

Now continue as usual. This way, by the time you get to the floating point part, you already got rid of all the numbers whose 2-power part is odd (about half), and then you only consider 1/8 of whats left. I.e. you run the floating point part on 6% of the numbers.

Answer 3

I checked all of the possible results when the last n bits of a square is observed. By successively examining more bits, up to 5/6th of inputs can be eliminated. I actually designed this to implement Fermat's Factorization algorithm, and it is very fast there.

public static boolean isSquare(final long val) {
   if ((val & 2) == 2 || (val & 7) == 5) {
     return false;
   }
   if ((val & 11) == 8 || (val & 31) == 20) {
     return false;
   }

   if ((val & 47) == 32 || (val & 127) == 80) {
     return false;
   }

   if ((val & 191) == 128 || (val & 511) == 320) {
     return false;
   }

   // if((val & a == b) || (val & c == d){
   //   return false;
   // }

   if (!modSq[(int) (val % modSq.length)]) {
        return false;
   }

   final long root = (long) Math.sqrt(val);
   return root * root == val;
}

The last bit of pseudocode can be used to extend the tests to eliminate more values. The tests above are for k = 0, 1, 2, 3