Cilian wrote:
I know what I'm doing, now I just have to see if I can explain it. I'm on the 3 mods. First off I call the symbols what they look like to me, mushroom, x, c, etc... I look at the last symbol of my key and the last symbol of my target. Example: Mushroom and 8. Then I look at the charmander chart and see all the things that will turn a mushroom into an 8. Like CC8. I look at my list, find the first line that ends in C. Put it in mod 1 space. Then I find the second ending in C line and put it in 2. Then I try all the ending in 8 lines in space 3. If that doesn't work, I change mod 2 to the third line ending in C and run through all the ending is 8s again. And on and on. If I get through all that then I switch mod 1 to the second ending in C line and keep up the process. If I get through it all with no results, I look for the next combo that changes a mushroom into an 8 and repeat it again. Lots of mindless plugging so I don't have to think (intelligent brute force). And I don't have to whip out paper which is always a plus in my book.
That's pretty much what I was doing last night. Once you've got the first two mods in places, you can also work out what the second symbol in the third mod would need to be (or the last symbol or the 5th symbol or whatever) given the first two mods. If you do that you usually need to try only 1 or 2 symbol sets for the third mod.
Still takes freaking forever, which is why I didn't finish them last night... which may have worked out either very well or very badly for me, depending on whether TNT freezes people retroactively for using the calculator.
Am I remembering correctly that some or all of the 3-mod problems have 30 possible codes? There are 27,000 possible combinations of those 30 codes. If you tried a combination a second, it would take 7.5 straight hours to hit all 27,000. Now, chances are you'd hit pay dirt before then... but yeah, intelligent brute force like you're describing here is really necessary to reduce the number of combinations you have to try to a vaguely reasonable number.