looping through possible combinations of McNuggets packs of 6, 9 and 20

[Baba]

On Aug 13, 8:25 pm, Ian Kelly <ian.g.ke... at gmail.com> wrote:

> It's not.  You're not just trying to find the sixth value that can be
> bought in exact quantity, but a sequence of six values that can all be
> bought in exact quantity.  The integers [6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 20] are not
> sequential.

Hi Ian,

Thanks for stating the obvious. I obviously hadn't understood a
fundamental part of the theorem which states that 6 SEQUENTIAL passes
must be found! That's a good lesson learned and will help me in future
exercises to make sure i understand the theory first. Thanks again!

Ok so with your and News123's help (no offence to all others but i
need to keep it simple at this stage)i was able to find the solution:
43

my code is probably not elegant but a huge step forward from where i
started:

def can_buy(n_nuggets):
   for a in range (0,n_nuggets):
       for b in range (0,n_nuggets):
           for c in range (0,n_nuggets):
               #print "trying for %d: %d %d %d" % (n_nuggets,a,b,c)
               if 6*a+9*b+20*c==n_nuggets:
                   return [a,b,c]
   return []

for n_nuggets in range(50):
    result1 = can_buy(n_nuggets)
    result2 = can_buy(n_nuggets+1)
    result3 = can_buy(n_nuggets+2)
    result4 = can_buy(n_nuggets+3)
    result5 = can_buy(n_nuggets+4)
    result6 = can_buy(n_nuggets+5)
    if result1!=[] and result2!=[] and result3!=[] and result4!=[] and
result5!=[] and result6!=[]:
     if (n_nuggets+5)-n_nuggets==5:
        print n_nuggets-1
        break

i suppose this can be tweaked to make it shorter? For instance i
wonder if i can do the same with less variable to be defined?

tnx
Baba