CountZero,
I am going to write a brute force solution this weekend but your math isn't quite right. First, you don't need all 26^8th since order doesn't matter. The upper bound is less than 5.2 million. We can reduce it further if we consider the maximum number of times a given letter can repeat. We do not have to consider a worst-case scenario dictionary so I think I can get that 5.2 million down to around 3 million. We still need to compare each of those 3 million against tens of thousands of words so I will be using C to do it but I think run time will be much less than 24 hours.

Update: My math was off somewhere. The upper bound was 13_884_156 and I was only able to reduce it down to 12_461_993. Since my word list contains 40,933 words (filtered down from 81_536), that means I am up to 510_106_759_469 checks. In order to finish in under 24 hours, I will need to be able to do 5.9 million checks per second. I hope my C skills are up for the challenge (stay tuned).

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