(08-13-2011, 01:25)yottabyte Wrote: Nevermind what I said, apparently the vault has got 12 levers. That is - if my calculations are correct - 4095 different combinations. Add one more lever and you get 8191 combinations. Add more and it keeps doubling.
However, if it only had say, six levers that is only 63 combinations.
Please do correct me if I'm wrong, I'm new with the binary stuff. Herp.
I think you are off by one Yotta, whenever I do combination locks I just use 2^n with n being the number of possible combinations. So a lock with 6 switches would have 64 combinations 63 of which are incorrect and 12 would have 4096, 4095 of which will fail to open the vault.
Combination locks are really insufficient for security though. A good vault employs timers/sequencing to make it infinitely more complex. And with pistons the timer can have a variable combination that changes randomly at a designated time interval.