Permutations

What, do you guys think, is the best way to arrange 7 aribtrary letters in all of thier combinations and enter them into an array or compare them to an array.

i want to loop through each of these combinations, and then compare it to an array of 4000 elements to see if there are any matches

P.S. there are 8031810176 combinations

Thats gonna take a long time to loop through!! :D

well I was wondering if there was a faster way to do it than just looping through all of the possible combinations

You could do it a bit like the mastermind game, if it finds that a particular letter never occurs in a position then skip that part of the loop.

eg

(4000 matches)
DJEMLSJ
HSYEKDM
etc....

(7 aribtrary letters)
AKTNDO

(loop starts with A in position 1)

A******

if A does not occur in position 1 for any of the 4000 matches then skip looping though the combinations with A in position 1.


Hope that makes sense - it just an idea, ive probably miss-understood!
:)