If I'm understanding what you're writing... you have something like:
- possible_word1(list of ~4-10 words)
- possible_word2(list of ~4-10 words)
- possible_word3(list of ~4-10 words)
...
- possible_word12(list of ~4-10 words)
and from the sounds of it, you actually 13 words? so, this is the "old" electrum seed format?
![Huh](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/huh.gif)
Anyway, assuming just 12 words for now, your possible seed combinations are: #word1_words * #word2_words * #word3_words * ... * #word12_words. Doesn't sound like much, until you do the math... even with "best case" of just 4 possible words in each position... that's 4^12 or 16,777,216 permutations.
Rough experience tells me that around ~6% of those will be "valid" (ie. the checksum matches)... so you're looking at something like ~1,006,632 "valid" seeds that you'd need to check for a match against your public address.
Anyway, I wrote a quick python script that takes in 12 files named 1.txt, 2.txt, 3.txt, ..., 12.txt (for my demo, each file has only 4 words) and then just iterates through the words in each position... it generates over 10,000 seeds/minute... and is finding (as expected) slightly more than 6% of those to be "valid".
Start: 2021-02-10 13:19:45.293000
10000 Seeds 2021-02-10 13:20:29.445000
621 Valid Seeds 2021-02-10 13:20:29.445000
20000 Seeds 2021-02-10 13:21:11.167000
1204 Valid Seeds 2021-02-10 13:21:11.167000
30000 Seeds 2021-02-10 13:21:55.523000
1832 Valid Seeds 2021-02-10 13:21:55.523000
40000 Seeds 2021-02-10 13:22:38.955000
2442 Valid Seeds 2021-02-10 13:22:38.955000
50000 Seeds 2021-02-10 13:23:23.073000
3041 Valid Seeds 2021-02-10 13:23:23.073000
60000 Seeds 2021-02-10 13:24:08.397000
3670 Valid Seeds 2021-02-10 13:24:08.397000
70000 Seeds 2021-02-10 13:24:53.846000
4308 Valid Seeds 2021-02-10 13:24:53.846000
80000 Seeds 2021-02-10 13:25:37.352000
4911 Valid Seeds 2021-02-10 13:25:37.352000
90000 Seeds 2021-02-10 13:26:23.622000
5543 Valid Seeds 2021-02-10 13:26:23.622000
100000 Seeds 2021-02-10 13:27:09.700000
6180 Valid Seeds 2021-02-10 13:27:09.700000
...
So, at ~10k seeds/minute... maybe ~1677 minutes to go through the full search space (only 4 words per slot, 12 slots)... which is around 28hours.
![Undecided](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/undecided.gif)
The main slow downs will be:
- More words in a given position... that's going to ramp up the total search space
- Actually generating private keys/addresses to check, as these are computationally a lot slower than just checking if a seed is valid.
With some optimisation, and maybe porting to C or something faster than Python, you'd probably gain some performance benefits... I'm sure it's in the realms of reality to be able to do it within a matter of days?
![Huh](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/huh.gif)
It really depends on how big your search space is... what are the exact number of words you have in each position?
![Huh](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/huh.gif)