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Cracking Feynman’s Safes in SQL Server
The puzzle, not the physics
I build daft things in SQL Server. Doom, Elite, a Boing ball bouncing around inside a result set. The rule’s always the same: pick something that has no business living in a database, and make it live there anyway. You learn more about the engine from one silly project than from a shelf of modelling books.
This one is Richard Feynman cracking safes at Los Alamos.
If you’ve read Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! you know the chapter “Safecracker Meets Safecracker.” Everyone remembers it as Feynman being a genius. It isn’t that. It’s Feynman being patient, and noticing that the locks were far worse than anyone assumed. He didn’t out-muscle the safes. He worked out how little he actually had to try. That’s a database problem if ever I saw one, so I pointed SQL Server 2025 at it.
The thing he actually spotted
The filing cabinets used Mosler combination locks. Three numbers, 0 to 99, left-right-left. On paper that’s a million combinations, and a million is a comfortable number to hide behind. Nobody’s trying a million of anything by hand.
