During the Summer and Fall Semester of 2001, I wrote some Pari routines for computing discrete logs using the index calculus method: index_calculus.gp | index_calculus_poly.gp | index_calculus_poly2.gp. The results are available. Text files (without the nice Excel charts) are available for those you who may be Micro$oft impaired: results_poly_all.txt | results_poly_random.txt. The idea was to find the value of a degree bound on the factor base that would minimize the running time for a polynomial of degree n. My results seem to support the known result (see, for example, "The Index Calculus Method Using Non-Smooth Polynomials" by Garefalakis and Panario in "Mathematics of Computation," Volume 70, Number 235, Pages 1253 - 1264) that choosing the degree bound = sqrt(a/b) where a = n*ln(n) and b = 2*ln(2) will minimize the running time.

Back to Research