  We map the problem of finding the prime factors of an integer to the
statistical physics problem of finding the ground state of a long-range
Ising-like model. As in the strongly disordered Newman-Stein (NS) spin-glass
model, the bond distribution is exponentially wide and grows with system size,
but unlike the NS model we find that it is not wide enough for a greedy
algorithm to be applicable. On the other hand, we also find that the
frustration and exponential width of the bond distribution renders classical
and quantum annealing and tempering methods no faster than a random search for
this challenging model.
