Can anyone tell me how they equated the Python function in the blog to what was shown in the Google's POW implementation? Seems a little difficult to follow.
The "exponent = (p + 1) // 4" in the Google code is 2^1277. To raise a number to such a huge power, you square it 1277 times (and that is what the Python function does). That works because if the initial value is "x", each squaring doubles the number of "x"s, and at the end you have 2^1277 of them.
