brookeclarke wroteI don’t understand that. Looking at the key there are 6 unique positions (assuming the entrance slot acts as warding so the key can not be used up side down) and for each of those positions 6 possible depths of cut for a total key space of 36 possible keys.
Consider a key for a lock with just two levers, with 6 possible cut depths.
For each of the 6 possible cuts for the first position, there are 6 possible cuts for the second position. This gives 6×6=36 differs which could be represented as follows :
1,1 1,2 1,3 1,4 1,5 1,6
2,1 2,2 2,3 2,4 2,5 2,6
3,1 3,2 3,3 3,4 3,5 3,6
4,1 4,2 4,3 4,4 4,5 4,6
5,1 5,2 5,3 5,4 5,5 5,6
6,1 6,2 6,3 6,4 6,5 6,6
For a key with three levers, 6 possible depths, we can take the 36 possible two lever keys and multiply by 6 for each possible cut for lever 3. Therefore there are 6×6×6=216 possible keys.
The same logic gives us 6×6×6×6=1296 possible keys for a 4 lever lock, 6×6×6×6×6 for a 5 lever lock and 6×6×6×6×6×6 for a 6 lever lock.
As BBE explained, not all of these theoretical differs will be used for various reasons.
I hope that clarified this and not made it more confusing instead!
…Mark
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