Combinatorial explosion

Combinatorial explosion is a situation in which a small change in the size of a problem can cause a huge increase in the amount of work required to solve the problem. Imagine you are trying to make a dish for dinner. You have a list of ingredients, but you don't know what to make. If you have four ingredients, you can think of four different dishes you could make from them. However, if you have 10 ingredients, you could make 10 times as many dishes – that's a combinatorial explosion!