We provide two complexity measures that can be used to measure the running
time of algorithms to compute multiplications of long integers. The random
access machine with unit or logarithmic cost is not adequate for measuring the
complexity of a task like multiplication of long integers. The Turing machine
is more useful here, but fails to take into account the multiplication
instruction for short integers, which is available on physical computing
devices. An interesting outcome is that the proposed refined complexity
measures do not rank the well known multiplication algorithms the same way as
the Turing machine model.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of Latin 2014. Springer LNCS 839