Primality testing with fewer random bits

In the usual formulations of the Miller-Rabin and Solovay-Strassen primality testing algorithms for a numbern, the algorithm chooses candidatesx ₁,x ₂, ...,x _k uniformly and independently at random from _n , and tests if any is a witness to the compositeness ofn. For either algorithm, the probabilty that it errs is at most 2^–k .In this paper, we study the error probabilities of these algorithms when the candidates are instead chosen asx, x+1, ..., x+k–1, wherex is chosen uniformly at random from _n . We prove that fork=1/2log₂ n], the error probability of the Miller-Rabin test is no more thann ^–1/2+o(1), which improves on the boundn ^–1/4+o(1) previously obtained by Bach. We prove similar bounds for the Solovay-Strassen test, but they are not quite as strong; in particular, we only obtain a bound ofn ^–1/2+o(1) if the number of distinct prime factors ofn iso(logn/loglogn).