How Fast Can We Multiply Large Integers on an Actual Computer?

Abstract

We provide two complexity measures that can be used to measure the running time of algorithms to compute multiplications of long integers. The random access machine with unit or logarithmic cost is not adequate for measuring the complexity of a task like multiplication of long integers. The Turing machine is more useful here, but fails to take into account the multiplication instruction for short integers, which is available on physical computing devices. An interesting outcome is that the proposed refined complexity measures do not rank the well known multiplication algorithms the same way as the Turing machine model.