- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Posted by: Mr MA5B
Posted by: sexy legs davis
Posted by: SPARTAN 00119
10 spaces long, thier are 1,000,000,000,000 different combanations.
Erm..no, I think you have to take into consideration a little mathematical friend named '!'.....
You would have to figure out the number of different characters that could be possibly used for that password, then multiply by 10. if there was 1,000,000,000,000 different combinations for a 10 character password, there would have to be 100,000,000,000 different characters that could be used for one character of the password.
No.
To my knowledge, there are 255 different ASCII chracters that can possibly be entered in for a password. That means 255^10 possibilities. So allow me to break it down:
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Those are the characters. These are the possibilities:
255 255 255 255 255 255 255 255 255 255
----- ------ ------ ----- ----- ------ ----- ----- ----- ------
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
We multiply the possibilities for each event - here, an event is what character is chosen for one slot. Thus, upon multiplying we get 255^10 = 1162523670191533212890625
Which is exactly the number I used earlier.
The word 'combinations' isn't exactly correct either because when we calculate combinations, we do so assume we cannot use the same value twice (without replacement) and we do so without regards to order. Permutations would be closer to what we're doing since we are considering passwords with the same characters, but simply juxtaposed, unique - however, Permutations, like Combinations, are calculated without replacement.
Without Replacement is why the ! (factorial operator) is needed when calculating Permutations and Calculations, however since that is not what we're doing here, the factorial operator is neither needed nor correct.
vectorracer - this one is for you. I really tried.