Enigmatic Code
Programming Enigma Puzzles
Enigma 1574: Doubly square dates
Posted by on 12 February 2012
From New Scientist #2737, 5th December 2009 [link] [link]
4 April 2001 was the first doubly square date of the century because whether written in the order day.month.year or in the order month.day.year (in each instance with two digits for each element) it comes out as 04.04.01, and 40401 is 201².
Still with two digits for each element, there are some doubly square dates for which the square that comes from the order day.month.year is not the same as the square that comes from the order month.day.year. This is the case for each of the next two doubly square dates after 4 April 2001. What are those two dates (in the same form as 4 April 2001)?
[enigma1574]
Enigmatic Code 
The following Python program runs in 50ms.
from enigma import irange, is_square, sprintf, printf def solve(): n = 0 for year in irange(0, 99): for month in irange(1, 12): for day in irange(1, 31): # consider the d-m-y format dmy = int(sprintf("{day:02d}{month:02d}{year:02d}")) r1 = is_square(dmy) if not r1: continue # now conside the m-d-y format mdy = int(sprintf("{month:02d}{day:02d}{year:02d}")) r2 = is_square(mdy) if not r2: continue printf("[{day:02d}.{month:02d}.{year:02d}] {r1}^2 = {dmy}, {r2}^2 = {mdy}") n += 1 if n == 3: return solve()Solution: The dates are 12 April 2009 and 4 December 2009.