Calculating Total Possible Combinations

205 Views Asked by At

I remember from my poker days the simple formula, 52*51, to calculate all of the unique combinations in a deck of 52 cards.

What I would like to do is calculate the total number of possible combinations for any alphanumeric three-character sequence. Some valid sequences are: aaa, 111, m7g, g7m, et cetera.

For example, if instead the input was simply a, b, and c, the output that I would be looking for is the following:

aaa, aab, abb, aac, acc, aba, aca, baa, caa, bbb, bba, bbc, bab, bcb, abb, cbb, ccc, cca, ccb, cac, cbc, acc, bcc.

However, in my case, the input will be abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789 instead of abc.

I'm not quite sure the same approach works for the following scenario. Is 36*35*34 sufficient when m7g and g7m, for instance, are considered unique and valid?

Disclaimer: I'm not sure I'm using the correct tags, so feel free to correct them!

1

There are 1 best solutions below

1
On BEST ANSWER

There are $36$ possible characters that can be in each of three positions, and hence the total number is $36^3$.