The topic says it all.

How you talking about Hacking into Computer terminals.

First of all take a look at all the words and I usually look for words with ing at the end or something common like that.

Second I look for duds and such they are found by looking for <>, [], etc their might be characters in between those type of characters.

Third depending on high your Intelligence you might not have that many words left so I use a word with an ing or some other common letters and then go from there depending on how many characters are correct.

Fourth, I check the correct letters and then check the remaining words and see which of those words have the correct letters and then go from there and repeat the process.

Usually I have the word by the 3 attempt and by the fourth I have it. I have not failed at hacking a computer terminal yet in FO3, NV, or FO4

Think of it like Hangman. When you pick, for instance, "Great" and it tells you that you have 2/5 correct, that means that "Great" has two letters in common with the correct password - only two letters, and in the right place. So "Green" couldn't be the right password since it has 3 letters in common with "Great", and even though "Fleet" has two in common with "Great" it might not have anything in common with the correct password, and say 0/5 correct. At this point you have a good chance that the password might be "Grape", and you can rule out anything that shares letters with "Fleet".

So when you look at all of the passwords, do a quick scan to see if any letters appear in the same place across a majority of the passwords. If you try one and get 0/5 letters, now you can rule out any passwords that share a letter in common with that password. A really easy way to narrow down the potential password is to look for common prefixes/suffixes, like re- or -ing or -ed (this was more useful in the last two Fallouts, seems like Fallout 4's passwords don't do this as often).

Also, some bonus tips: The amount of passwords on the screen goes down by one for each point of Intelligence you have, so you can pop some Mentats to thin out the potential options. And if you go through and find anything in brackets: () {} [] <> and you can highlight a bracketed section, you can pick that in order to either reset the amount of tries you have left or remove a dud from the list of passwords. Very handy.

Basically you choose one word. The number match you get is how many of the letters in that word match the letter AND position of the password. You then look at the other words and find ones that have just that number of letters in the correct position matching. If it only has some of the letters in the same position or if it has more letters in the same position matching then it is not the correct one. You get 4 tries before you are locked out for 10 seconds.

You can also use a close set of parenthesis or brackets or <>, regardless of what is in the middle of them, to give you help. Some remove wrong passwords, some reset the number of tries you get. Both this <> and this would be valid, same with (), [ ] , { } and if there's anything else like that.

Here's how I do it.

1st select the 1st 3 words on the left column. If that doesn't get you in start looking for brackets that look like (*#) [9*^@] {(&D&} <*D^> or similar variations. Most of the time clicking on the first bracket in the set will clear duds, and some will reset your chances, and will allow you to select 3 more words.

usually it says only

Likeness 1

but it doesnt tell me what postion...unless im totally wrong i thought the letter meant there is 1 word with the likeness...?

ok i think i got it

It took me over 150 hrs playing - painfully searching for the brackets in the field - before I realized that I could just run my cursor over ALL the letters and watch for one of them to expand the selection. It's actually faster than looking carefully. I do that before making any guesses, which does cause me to "waste" any Tries Reset hits, but finding all the specials always results in fewer remaining words than I have guesses now so it's never a problem.