# Almost Equilaterial Heronian Triangles

An Almost Equilateral Heronian Triangle is a triangle with integer lengths of the form n-1, n, and n+1 and also has integer area. The first few are:

 3,  4,  5 ->    6
13, 14, 15 ->   84
51, 52, 53 -> 1170


Quest: Generate the shortest program that outputs the nth such triple. (Hint: this is a known sequence).

Winner will be selected on May 2, 2014.

• For what it's worth, this is equivalent to one of the more widely studied Pell equations. – Peter Taylor Apr 21 '14 at 8:35
• I don't really understand the downvotes. This is a fairly simple task but I don't see any problem with the question. But I have to say (as a left handed person) that the restriction is one of the weirdest and easiest to comply with I have ever seen. – Level River St Apr 21 '14 at 9:48
• @steveverrill, although I didn't downvote I did choose not to upvote because of the pointless restriction. I suspect that the close votes are also because of the restriction: I bet that less than 10% of the world's population use the same keyboard layout as Kyle. – Peter Taylor Apr 21 '14 at 11:19
• i liked the restriction @KyleKanos, even though left-handed people disgust me – ardnew Apr 21 '14 at 15:21
• @ardnew Of all the places, this is one of the least likely I would expect such handist comments :P – Digital Trauma Apr 21 '14 at 16:16

### APL, 15 14 charaters

0 1 2+⌊⎕*⍨2+√3


Same approach as alephalpha's solution but uses floor instead of the correction term.

Thank you to algorithmshark for pointing out that the commute operator saves one char.

• (⍳3) saves a char over 0 1 2, and I'm pretty sure you can use Commute to make it ⎕*⍨2+√3 and save another. – algorithmshark Apr 21 '14 at 18:45
• @algorithmshark Thank you for those ideas. Unfortunately ⍳3 yields 1 2 3 and thus is one char longer. – Howard Apr 22 '14 at 5:09

# Mathematica, 26, 22, 16 18 chars

{0,1,2}+⌊(2+√3)^n⌋

• A bit too much golfing: it won't work in the current form (see here). – Howard Apr 22 '14 at 5:13

## GolfScript (24 21 chars)

2 4@~{.4*@-}*;.(\.)]p


Takes input on stdin, gives output to stdout in the form

[3 4 5]


Online demo

Note that I've assumed that the 0th element of the sequence is [1 2 3] (with area 0), which I think is consistent with OEIS A003500.

With thanks to Howard for a 3-char saving.

• Using (.).)] is two chars shorter. Moreover, if you start with 2 4 you can replace \; with ; and save an additional one. – Howard Apr 21 '14 at 14:09
• @Howard, I originally had 2 4 and treated [3 4 5] as the 0th element, so I'm embarrassed not to have spotted that alternative way to exploit the offset. Thanks. – Peter Taylor Apr 21 '14 at 14:27

# GNU dc, 30 19 bytes

9k3v2+?^0k1/p1+p1+p


This uses the same trick as @Howard's APL answer so only one term has to be calculated. Takes input for n from stdin.

Output:

$dc -e '9k3v2+?^0k1/p1+p1+p' <<< 1 3 4 5$ dc -e '9k3v2+?^0k1/p1+p1+p' <<< 2
13
14
15
$dc -e '9k3v2+?^0k1/p1+p1+p' <<< 3 51 52 53$


## Python 77

Quite a verbose implementation in Python

[(a-1,a,a+1)for a in(int((2+3**.5)**t+(2-3**.5)**t+.1)for t in range(N))][-1]

• Are we supposed to replace N with a value? Your program doesn't ask for any input. – golfer9338 Apr 21 '14 at 22:17

# Python 3, 83 characters

f=lambda t:4*f(t-1)-f(t-2)if t>2 else(4,14)[t-1];n=f(int(input()));print(n-1,n,n+1)


This uses a recursive solution, taking advantage of the fact that (quote from Wikipedia):

Subsequent values of n can be found by multiplying the previous value by 4, then subtracting the value prior to that one (52 = 4 × 14 − 4, 194 = 4 × 52 − 14, etc.)

# JavaScript (ECMAScript 6) - 52 Characters

f=x=>x?--x?4*f(x)-f(x-1):4:2
g=x=>[a=f(x)-1,a+1,a+2]


Defines a recursive function f which returns the nth term and a function g which returns an array containing the corresponding triple.

# JavaScript - 41 Characters

for(a=2,b=4;--x;)b=-a+4*(a=b);[a-1,a,a+1]


Expects the term to be calculated to be stored in the global variable x and outputs the triple to the console.

# CJam, 13 bytes

3,3mq))ri#if+p


The first version of CJam is 10 days older than this challenge, but I don't know if all of the features I'm using have been present back then. The challenge is officially closed anyway though, so...

Test it here.

## Explanation

3mq            e# Push √3.
))          e# Increment twice.
ri        e# Read input and convert to integer.
#       e# Raise 2+√3 to that power.
i      e# Convert to integer, truncating the result.
3,    e# Push [0 1 2]
f+  e# Add the previous number to each of these.
p e# Pretty-print the result.