NEED HELP!!! mathematical possibilities question...

[barenakedladies]

ok... i dont know how to figure thiis out.

If someone could show me a formula for this, i would appreciate it.

i have a 12 digit code. It can contain letters or numbers 0-9
(therefore 36 possible digits in each of the 12 spaces)

how do i figure out how many possibilities there are?


also anyone know of a random generator out there to generate possibilities?

Im trying to come up with something for my business with redeemable codes for online. (Award points)

[alpha phi]

wouldn't that be 36 to the 12th power
or 36*36*36*36*36*36*36*36*36*36*36*36=4,738,381,338,321,616,896
/just a guess

[kutulu]

as long as characters can be repeated throughout (as in aaaaaaaaaaaa is a valid code), that is correct.

[barenakedladies]

i did figure it out myself as well, you are correct.

4,738,381,338,321,616,896 different possibilities.

thats a lot. i believe quintillion.

is there any way to randomly generate different possibilities. anyone know of a program online?

[xepherys]

generate possibilities as in trying to brute force a correct number? There are plenty... look for a brute force password cracker, tell it that it's alphanumeric with 12-characters. *shrug*

[Tachion]

Originally Posted by barenakedladies

i did figure it out myself as well, you are correct.

4,738,381,338,321,616,896 different possibilities.

thats a lot. i believe quintillion.

is there any way to randomly generate different possibilities. anyone know of a program online?

If you could generate a million a second it would take aproximately 150,000 years to finish, by my calculations.

[Zeraph]

Originally Posted by Tachion

If you could generate a million a second it would take aproximately 150,000 years to finish, by my calculations.

Ya but a computer can generate way more than 1 per sec.

[Tachion]

Originally Posted by Zeraph

Ya but a computer can generate way more than 1 per sec.

I said a MILLION per second.

[Zeraph]

Originally Posted by Tachion

I said a MILLION per second.

Ah my bad

[Reese]

You're wanting to generate a random 12 digit number A-Z & 1-9 to put on the coupons right? If so I'd go with a random password generator. There's a web based one at http://www.winguides.com/security/password.php It's quick but it might not be as secure as you'd want for a business coupon code.

[xepherys]

I could whip something up in PHP pretty easily I'd think. You'd need a DB to store the generated codes and verify codes are unique, as well as disable them once they've been redeemed. Otherwise, the code generation would be easy enough, and the barcode generation should be easy as well with PHP classes and the gd library.

Do you need Code 39, Code 93, Standard 25, Interleaved 25?

[Brickstone]

Here's one for ya.

1111123 is not one number, but 6 you see.

And if you get this clue in sum, you'll know where to head south from.

It's a clue in a treasure hunt - Help?

[Nizzle]

On any unix machine:


perl -e 'for($i=0;$i<12;$i++){print(("a".."z",0..9)[rand(0)*36])}'