Some curious students have built a robot that mechanically cracks electronic safes.

It is worth noting that the standard lock for classified documents has since been upgraded to an even more advanced electronic lock, so our machine is not a national security threat. I’m going to be describing our process under the assumption that the lock really is “manipulation-proof” and that the only way to open the safe is to try every possible combination.

Combination space optimization is the key. By exploiting of the mechanical tolerances of the lock and certain combination “forbidden zones”, we reduced the number of possible combinations by about an order of magnitude. Again, read the paper mentioned above for details. Grant implemented our algorithm in Java and was able to test it far before we started constructing the dialer.

They say their “auto dialer” robot, run by a laptop, successfully opened the safe in only a couple hours.