My mom's been losing keys and passwords left and right lately. The last one she forgot was the combination for our key box outside. It's a 4 digit (0-9) code, where order doesn't matter---- 4 keys press in, then you pull down a switch to test it. My mom is offering Cole $10 if he can figure out the code, thinking it next to impossible. Remembering my statistics, I realized it wasn't really that hard at all: there are only 210 possibilities. Nine lines of Perl later, I emailed Cole a list of possible combos and he's out there now in a lawn chair trying them all. I wanted $5 for my effort, but he's a stingy bastard.
foreach $a (0..9) {
foreach $b (grep { $_ != $a } (0..9)) {
foreach $c (grep { $_ != $a && $_ != $b } (0..9)) {
foreach $d (grep { $_ != $a && $_ != $b && $_ != $c } (0..9)) {
my $sorted = join(", ", sort { $a <=> $b } ($a, $b, $c, $d));
unless ($used{$sorted}++) {
print "$sorted\n";
} } } } }
Well, that's 8 if you don't count the #!/usr/bin/perl.
Update! My brother found it! He just came and gave me a dollar. Woohoo! Time to quit my day job! (wait ... I don't have a day job...)
