4 ms·
>The odds of Mr Mills correctly guessing the combination are pretty long, says the University of Toronto's Jeffrey Rosenthal, author of Knock on Wood: Luck, Cha
by prvc 7y ago
>The odds of Mr Mills correctly guessing the combination are pretty long, says the University of Toronto's Jeffrey Rosenthal, author of Knock on Wood: Luck, Chance, and the Meaning of Everything.
>He calculated the chance of correctly guessing the combination on one try as 1 in 216,000. (His calculation assumed the safe numbers actually ran from one to 60).
Glad they managed to find an expert with the calculating skill to clear up that other enigma as well.
- GCA10 7y agoJust to be cranky, shouldn't we eliminate all the permutations that use the same number three times? (i.e. 11-11-11)? My knowledge of combination locks doesn't extend much beyond goofing with Master locks in high school, but the more rudimentary designs require that the middle number be different from either of the two end ones. This doesn't sound like a super-advanced safe.
- brk 7y agoNot only different, but different by a couple of digits to account for the width of the tabs on the discs inside the lock that you are rotating with the knob.
- lostlogin 7y agoAll the safes I have used have codes that get closer to ‘0’ with each turn/direction change. This might be a low number when turning anti-clockwise or a high one when turning clockwise. These weren’t sophisticated mechanisms, so it might just be these models.