[phkahler]

Thanks, the mathoverflow link was very informative. It's funny because I started out computing a number that I thought would be useful for factoring N, but it turned out that it would take one of 2 values depending if N was prime or had 2 factors (this is easily proven). Subsequent testing via software seemed to indicate it was actually determining the parity of the number of primes. I believe that's what it does in general but never bothered to go any further.