Question

A company requires a password to access a data storage vault. The password must be 4 characters long and may

contain digits and lowercase letters only.
How many passwords are possible if characters can be repeated? Enter your answer as a number, like this: 425

Answer 1

To calculate the number of possible 4-character passwords using digits and letters with repetition allowed, you compute 36^4, which gives 1,679,616 combinations.

Step-by-step explanation:

To determine the number of possible passwords that can be created with 4 characters where each character can be a digit or a lowercase letter, we need to consider the number of choices for each position. Since there are 10 digits (0-9) and 26 lowercase letters (a-z), each character can be one of 36 possible options (10 digits + 26 letters).

The first character can be any of the 36, and since repetition is allowed, the second, third, and fourth characters can also each be any of the 36 options. So, the total number of combinations is found by multiplying the number of options for each position, which is 36 × 36 × 36 × 36, or 36^4.

Calculating this we get 1,679,616 possible password combinations.