Comparing probabilities to opportunities

I’d like to illustrate the problem this way. It’s called the problem of combinatorials. If you’ve got four dials and ten digits on each, you get ten thousand possibilities, only one combination. If you’re a thief out there trying to crack this lock maybe, is it more likely that you’ll crack the lock by chance or fail?  It’s a trick question. What else do you have to know? You have to know how much time, how many opportunities. If you have enough opportunities to do 5001 possible combinations, it becomes more likely that you’ll succeed than fail, in which case the chance hypothesis becomes more likely to be true than false. But what if the thief encounters a lock with 10 dials and 10 digits on each. This lock now gets a lot harder. I did some math on this and found that if the thief lived for 100 years, changed one dial every 10 seconds, took no toilet breaks, had no dates, never ate dinner or anything else, he could sample about three percent of the total 10 billion possible combinations in 100 years. In that case, it’s much more likely that the thief will fail than succeed in randomly searching for the combination, in which case the chance hypothesis is more likely to be false and true.