Permutations

[Gandalf_Grey_]

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

[Pancake]

Thats gonna take a long time to loop through!!

[Gandalf_Grey_]

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

[Pancake]

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!