Creative Scratchpad

A Pythagorean triplet is a set of three natural numbers, a < b < c, for which,

a² + b² = c²

For example, 3² + 4² = 9 + 16 = 25 = 5².

There exists exactly one Pythagorean triplet for which a + b + c = 1000.
Find the product abc.

So, here we are, we have the sum and we know that a < b < c and on paper the sides would make a right-angled triangle. That gives us a + b > c as we can't have a triangle where the sum of the lenghts of two of its sides would be smaller than the length of the third one. For this case it means that c can't be bigger than 500, and as it is as well the biggest of the three numbers it also implies that neither a nor b can get bigger than 500. This means that we can set our upper limit to nr/2. As a < b it makes sense to start searching for b at a + 1. For each such pair of a and b we get c by substracting them from the target sum and if it works in the Pythagorean equation, we return it.

fn getTripleForSum nr =
(
    local half = nr/2
    local a, b, c

    for a = 1 to half do
        for b = (a + 1) to half do
        (
            c = nr - a - b
            if c^2 == (a^2 + b^2) do
                return a*b*c
        )
)

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