Re: HSC 2015 3U Marathon
Does this mean the question was only asking for the number of combinations but not the number of passwords that could be tried?Maybe I've misinterpreted the Q or screwed up some working out, but I'm not sure why the answer is .
Say we had k = 2 (so two different numbers from 0-9 used), and n = 3 (three-digit password).
Let's just say for now the two distinct digits used were 1 and 2. Since n = 3, these are the possibilities: 112, 121, 211, 221, 212, 122. That's 6 possibilities.
But we could do the same for all possible choices of two distinct digits. So it seems like the total possible ways for n = 3, k = 2 is: . But this doesn't agree with the answer, since .
Edit: My bad, Q said combinations, not permutations