So when that kxcd article came out it became clear to me that even if you took the most popular 30_000 english words, it was only 30_000 ^ 4 cycles to find the

So when that kxcd article came out it became clear to me that even if you took the most popular 30_000 english words, it was only 30_000 ^ 4 cycles to find the password, or about 1.8e17 choices. On the other hand a password consisting of 8 * 7 bit characters is 2 ^ 56, or about 7.2e16 choices. So it ends up being only a factor of 2 larger than 8 character ascii passwords. If you end up choosing words in the most popular 1_000 english words, it's 1e12 total choices. I postulate that it's possible to create an algorithm that will search words by popularity so "cat-dog-house-street" will be found much much faster than "zephyr-quasar-fricasee-parabola"