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www.mikescher.com/www/statics/euler/Euler_Problem-086_explanation.md
2018-02-03 16:50:58 +01:00

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The spider essentially travels on the hypotenuse of a triangle with the sides A and B+C. For it to be the shortest path the condition A <= B+C must be true.

The amount of integer-cuboids for a given value M is "All integer-cuboids with A=M" plus integer-cuboids(M-1). In our loop we start with M=1 and increment it in every step. We also remember the last value (for M-1) and loop until the value exceeds one million.

For a given value A = M we go through all possible BC value (0 <= BC <= 2*A) and test if M^2 + BC^2 is an integer-square. If such a number is found and BC <= A then this means we have found BC/2 additional cuboids (there are BC/2 different B+C = BC combinations where B <= C) If, on the other hand BC > A then we have only found A - (BC + 1)/2 + 1 additional cuboids (because the conditionA <= BC must be satisfied).

One of the more interesting parts was the isSquareNumber() function, which test if a number x has an integer square-root. To speed this function up (it takes most of the runtime) we can eliminate around 12% of the numbers with a few clever tricks. For example if the last digit of x is 2, x is never a perfect square-number. Or equally if the last hex-digit is 7. In our program we test twelve conditions like that:

x % 16  > 9
x % 64  > 57
x % 16 == 2
x % 16 == 3
x % 16 == 5
x % 16 == 6
x % 16 == 7
x % 16 == 8
x % 10 == 2
x % 10 == 3
x % 10 == 7
x % 3  == 2

Sources:

If none of this pre-conditions is true we have to manually test the number. We use the same the same integer-squareroot algorithm as in previous problems. If isqrt(x)^2 == x the we can be sure that x is a perfect square number.