How these figures are calculated
The analysis evaluates all 10,000 fixed-width strings, including leading-zero inputs and the 10 repdigits. “Average journey” is the arithmetic mean of the displayed iteration counts, while the median is the middle value after those counts are sorted. The maximum is found from the same complete set rather than from random trials.
The zero destination is reported separately because repdigits immediately collapse to 0000. For every other input in the 4-digit routine, the destination is 6174. Permutations often share a path after their first subtraction, which explains why many starting values have identical journey lengths.
Read the testing methodology →