Thanks for all the responses. I was hoping that knowing 6 (and possibly 4 more) would make it more feasible. It's a situation where throwing a lot of money in computing power could make sense. I saw an article that stated you could rent 1,000,000 Nvidia CUDA cores for $100/hour. Can someone explain to me how much searching power that is? What would be the math (big assumption, I know) if two of the four maybe words are right, so 8 of 12 words without knowing the order if those machines were rented?  

   
   I need help understanding how seed words were used in 2012. I understand that there was a standardized list created in 2013 but what does that mean for my 2012 seed words? I'm trying to piece together the words and all the ones that I remember are in the standardized list. Is there a chance that if I find my seed words they won't work? Are there abandoned seed word lists? Would they still create a new wallet in something like Electrum?

 Is it impossible because the words are out of order? What if 2,3 or 4 of the possible words were correct? What if you rented 10x, 100x, 1,000x the computing power?

  So I just read a story written by John Cantrell on how he won a Bitcoin in 2020 by searching over 1 trillion mnemonics in 30 hours. Based on what he has written and discussed in that story here are my questions.

   Here is what's known:

    An Electrum wallet was made in April of 2012.
    The public address of the wallet is known.
    6 of the 12 seed words are known (but not the order).
    4 of the remaining seed words are a possible match.

  Given his approach how long would it take if only 6 of the words match, 7 match, 8 match, 9 match or 10 match?

  How much have speeds of the GPU's he used increased since his attempt in 2020?

  What kind of computing power could you realistically rent if you wanted to and how much quicker would the computations be with that rented power?

  What would the cost of what he rented be today? Cost for 10x faster, 100x faster etc...?


   Thanks to everyone for taking the time to read this and help with your replies.