[dumbfounder]

Think about this. You need to calculate the number of permutation for 4 digit codes. Then you need to arrange them in every order possible to brute force. So that’s 4!!. That’s a lot: roughly 620000000000000000000000 combos.

[somenameforme]

If you're not making some joke that I'm missing it's just 10^4 = 10000, which is a just a fancier way of saying 0000-9999.

[fc417fc802]

10^4 permutations. Which you then permute again except the second time you're overlapping them to search for the shortest possible sequence.

[genewitch]

Or it's 10000?

[SamBam]

That's the number of possible codes. Not the number of possible ways you could arrange all 10000 codes to see which ordering contains the most shortcuts.

[genewitch]

i have a python script running through that right now to find "the shortest" and it's been burning a single core for at least 6 hours. So it looks like you are right and i am wrong ;-)

i assume my pc on a single core can do ~1billion permutations per second, this will take 19,647 millennia. AFK.

what do you think the chances are, if i let this run, that it would find a shorter solution than 625 keypresses? the naive De Bruijn algorithm popped that out in like 2 seconds.