English

Counting basic-irreducible factors mod $p^k$ in deterministic poly-time and $p$-adic applications

Symbolic Computation 2019-02-27 v1 Computational Complexity Data Structures and Algorithms Number Theory

Abstract

Finding an irreducible factor, of a polynomial f(x)f(x) modulo a prime pp, is not known to be in deterministic polynomial time. Though there is such a classical algorithm that {\em counts} the number of irreducible factors of fmodpf\bmod p. We can ask the same question modulo prime-powers pkp^k. The irreducible factors of fmodpkf\bmod p^k blow up exponentially in number; making it hard to describe them. Can we count those irreducible factors mod pk\bmod~p^k that remain irreducible mod pp? These are called {\em basic-irreducible}. A simple example is in f=x2+pxmodp2f=x^2+px \bmod p^2; it has pp many basic-irreducible factors. Also note that, x2+pmodp2x^2+p \bmod p^2 is irreducible but not basic-irreducible! We give an algorithm to count the number of basic-irreducible factors of fmodpkf\bmod p^k in deterministic poly(deg(f),klogp(f),k\log p)-time. This solves the open questions posed in (Cheng et al, ANTS'18 \& Kopp et al, Math.Comp.'19). In particular, we are counting roots mod pk\bmod\ p^k; which gives the first deterministic poly-time algorithm to compute Igusa zeta function of ff. Also, our algorithm efficiently partitions the set of all basic-irreducible factors (possibly exponential) into merely deg(f)(f)-many disjoint sets, using a compact tree data structure and {\em split} ideals.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1902.07785,
  title  = {Counting basic-irreducible factors mod $p^k$ in deterministic poly-time and $p$-adic applications},
  author = {Ashish Dwivedi and Rajat Mittal and Nitin Saxena},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.07785},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

28 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T07:46:30.789Z