'Stupid Inventions' Update
About one month ago, Staples listed the semi-finalists in their "Invention Quest." Today they announced the winner - WordLock. The ridiculous thing about this product was the problems involved in using the alphabet (26 characters) instead of numbers (10 characters or an infinite number of values). My original critique was based on the traditional style combination lock. In the announcement regarding the winner, they pictured a different style lock, which has its own problems:
In the image, there are 5 positions, which might lead one to expect 26^5 combinations (11,881,376), which is a lot. However, the wheels aren't large enough to accommodate the full alphabet. In the picture, only 4 letters are visible per wheel. Assuming half the wheel is visible, that's 8 characters per wheel (8^5 = 32,768). Considering that's twice my original estimate (based on the traditional style lock), it's a bit of an advancement, but still negligible.
Further harming the situation is the fact that there are far fewer words than numbers. Traditional combinations don't have meaning, and weren't intended to. The point of WordLock was to create combinations with meaning - which basically means using words as combinations. In 5 characters, there are a lot of words (around 7,000), but how many of them can be created when the letter for each position is drawn from a set of only 8 letters? Far fewer!
The end result here is that there is virtually no reasonable way to make a reasonably sized alphabetic combination lock, except as follows (my own idea):
Start with the basic design of a standard lock, but instead of 50 numbers, use capital and lower case letters. This will lead to 52 choices per wheel, for a total of 140,608 combinations. The only problems are printing the letter on the wheel in a legible fashion and the fact that these types of locks are NOT user-customizable. (Therefore the manufacturer must pick the words, and the consumer has only the choices available in the store at the time of purchase.)