Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher

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uu1hcw9nx about 5 hours ago 187 commentsRead Article on vals.ai

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redfloatplane•about 4 hours ago

A very neat problem and result. I often find myself swinging between "It's so over" and "We're so back" - some days I roll out of bed thinking I could have Claude solve some random unproven OEIS sequence before breakfast; other days, I wake up in a cold sweat worried about the fate of humanity and what the world might look like in a decade. I think it's that I don't have a very high p(doom) or p(utopia), and I don't really have any solid conviction on how this whole thing is going to go, so my vibe-o-meter jitters between 'fine' and 'not fine' constantly. It's just such an unpredictable moment. Anyways: really neat to see this use case. I myself recently used Claude to finally do an relatively exhaustive study of the location of heretofore-unlisted formal gardens in Ireland in the early 1800s and early 1900s, by having Claude write the tooling for me to manually annotate a few dozen on tiles of historic maps, and then running some CV model across the rest of the tiles using my input. I'd been planning to do this project for over a decade, but I could never find the time (or the enthusiasm) to learn all the details of how to do it myself. It took me a weekend with Claude and continues to bring me joy.

> Caveats, stated plainly. [from the Fable transcript pasted in the article]

I had a visceral reaction to these three words.

elahieh•about 3 hours ago

"Caveats, stated plainly"

You should have seen the discussion of this on the Schneier blog a few days ago.

Someone had their agent check the solution, presumably it emailed a librarian to check that it was correct for the original edition. Then their comments read like "The BL/EEBO witness lacks it, so the discrepancy is copy-specific, not a disproof of the cipher." and "A complete 285-coordinate physical replication is still pending."

arghhhhh

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/09/claude-fable-...

tren•about 2 hours ago

It's a shame that I have to run a local model to decipher Opus, but them "dumber" models read far more naturally - https://github.com/gvzdv/claudish-to-english

stavros•about 3 hours ago

Astra told me yesterday:

> The run baseline was captured without a physical MAC; the current device is not durably bound to it.

> Engineering mode confirmation is the ESPHome component read-back; the LD2410 UART acknowledgement is not observed, so this is not proof the radar itself applied the sensitivity change.

No clue what the fuck any of it means.

florkbork•36 minutes ago

Its telling you your mmWave radar isn't speaking over serial communication well.

https://www.analog.com/en/resources/analog-dialogue/articles...

(Its negging your soldering)

ramigb•about 2 hours ago

It was only when native English speakers—or those I presumed were—started calling out how bad "GPT/Claude speak" has become that I realized I wasn't actually losing my grip on English as a second language. For a second, I thought, Oh, I learned this language on my own, but it seems I've hit a wall and need to study further. It didn't help that I've also been trying to acquire Swedish as a third language for a while now.

baron3dl•about 2 hours ago

Sometimes when I get frustrated reading Opus/Fable 5+ output I pause my rage out briefly to wonder if it's because I'm just too dumb for the model or if the model is just terrible at English.

I'm not sure that telling it to "try explaining that again, simply and briefly" is helping my ego.

jimbobimbo•about 2 hours ago

The most surprising part, however, is that when one model slops this into a plan, another model somehow is able to interpret it correctly enough to produce code to spec.

sheepscreek•26 minutes ago

There’s some specific terminology here, like the MAC address of the network device, which might have been virtual.

UART is a hardware circuit for communication, possibly a serial port. Were you trying to reverse engineer a consumer device or appliance?

This particular instance doesn’t seem terse, but I’m sure it has been on other occasions :)

jsw97•about 2 hours ago

I bet this is what the thinking blocks look like. If so then it maybe it is intelligible, just not to us. I have the same problem.

mikestaas•about 2 hours ago

Reminds me a bit of VXJunkies

flir•about 4 hours ago

I've done something similar to your formal garden map. It's work that no professional historian would ever do because the data entry would be such a slog for a relatively small reward. GPT reduced the task from "infeasible" to "annoying", and once I had the data transcribed I learned a few things, so I walked away happy. Whatever happens commercially, these models have been a real boon to hobby projects.

> I told it to look online at some of Fable’s strongest feats, especially the math problems it has solved, and that something like this should be easy in comparison.

Wait. Wait wait wait. Are we supposed to be giving them pep talks?

kay_o•about 3 hours ago

on older gemini models ide have to actively give them encouragement and/or easy bait problems that they can correctively solve without issue to avoid runaway spiraling into "i'm useless and i want to kms" behaviour with complex use case.

I have not seen this in other models.

Sophira•about 3 hours ago

I assumed it was more because the LLM might echo an understandable human claim of "if it's been unsolved for 370 years, it's unlikely to be solved now/likely to need expert knowledge", which is probably a mindset that appears in its training data.

The LLM likely needs to be reminded of its abilities.

bananaflag•about 3 hours ago

It won't be necessary in a year when the information "AI is superhuman" in all its guises enters the training data.

ACCount37•about 2 hours ago

Sometimes!

Modern AIs have very limited metaknowledge - they don't know exactly where the limits of their capabilities lie. So you can get things like "a task is doable for an AI, but the AI thinks it's impossible, so it doesn't try hard enough".

Usually you get the opposite - AI overconfidently trying at tasks it has no conceivable way of reliably solving, falling far short, and failing to self-check, fail gracefully and self-report the task as failed. But having piss poor metaknowledge cuts both ways!

So you can, in fact, get better performance sometimes by applying some variant of "assume this problem is solvable" or "other problems like this were already solved by AIs" pep talk. Not always, far from it, but it does happen on the occasion with frontier capabilities.

tough•about 2 hours ago

Some times also having unreasonable goals makes them creatively work around the problem to meet them. I guess it works similarly for meat or sillicon

taberiand•about 3 hours ago

Anytime I get worried about where AI might be headed, I think about how Climate Change is now on its way like an out of control freight train headed straight for us, and I worry about AI a little less. I doubt it's going to do anything to us that we're not already doing to ourselves

aforwardslash•about 3 hours ago

It has been for a decade now, it has nothing to do with AI. And you cant do nothing to avoid it today. This is the reality no one is telling you - the emission goals and global temperature ceilings are based on the fact that most prediction models become unstable with values above those limits; as in, we're probably royally fucked. You cant solve this with kumbaya politics (the problem is the CO2 is already in the planetary system), you can only manage it, and hopefully avoid it getting worse. AI may help a lot with this.

doctorpangloss•about 2 hours ago

Nobody wants to work for an AI, and nobody would elect one, and there is no math answer to how to choose who is forced to reduce growth (ie emissions), so really, "kumbaya" politics are the ONLY solution.

bluebarbet•about 3 hours ago

Here's an alternative take. Climate change, and the myriad related environmental crises, are essentially a product of human population and technology. Population will follow its course, up and then down. The wildcard is technology. Yes, AI's energy hunger is worsening things right now and that's a problem. But, personally, I can't help be hopeful that AI's sheer potential might come to invert that curve. At the very least we could really use a revolutionary technology and now we may have one.

monk_grilla•about 3 hours ago

> we could really use a revolutionary technology [to address climate change]

We have it. We've had it for a long time. We've had several such technologies, take your pick: solar, nuclear, hydro, wind. The technology is not holding us back, politics, ignorance and greed are. I'm not at all hopeful AI will help us with any of those three very human flaws.

vouaobrasil•about 3 hours ago

If there is energy to be used, the system will use it because people always use power when it exists. AI can't do anything to stop it as it is both controlled by the powerful and has been trained on the tendencies of human beings to get ahead. If AI gives a person new capabilities, they'll use those capabilities selfishly, or even unselfishly but still causing harm because they're in an arms race.

We don't need a revolutionary technology. We need to experience immediate pain from reckless innovation so that we realize that innovation and tech is not the answer.

Technology only proceeds in one direction: unfettered growth, which necessitates unsustainable resource extraction. Your take is just your instinct for optimism, which in turn is just a trait that is only adaptive in primitive environments but is grossly misleading in a surplus-based society...

karussell•about 3 hours ago

For some reason, I’m picturing a Western right now, and climate change is a herd of wild horses coming after us. And with AI that's like robots that spur the wild horses even faster towards us...

throw1235435•about 2 hours ago

Generally most technologies have increased the use of energy and therefore accelerate climate change. May be an unpopular opinion but in general more energy demand and ways to use energy increases climate emissions - they are strongly correlated even with renewables coming on stream.

AI, being the super hungry energy monster it is right now, in my view accelerates this trend not reverses it. Even with renewables the need for reliable, stable power in a dense form (data centres use A LOT of power per sqm) means lots of land clearing, energy for construction, cooling/pumping, chip manufacturing and other uses. All want stable quick to deploy power due to the AI race (e.g. fossil fuels).

SwellJoe•about 3 hours ago

The gas generators Elon Musk is illegally running 24/7 to run Colossus 2 (and, AI power usage in general, though some are more destructive than others) might contribute to the climate situation, though.

KeplerBoy•about 3 hours ago

might?

_blk•about 3 hours ago

What makes you say that on climate change? I was still prophesied ice ages when in high school, then 12ft water increases and sunk Maldives in university and we still have roughly the same weather.

monk_grilla•about 3 hours ago

You have entirely failed to grasp what climate change is, its effects and the timeline as described by scientists for decades.

dhosek•about 3 hours ago

Weather is not climate. Not to mention we really don’t have roughly the same weather anyway.

voidfunc•about 3 hours ago

At some point you realize theres an entire industry around climate change fear just like there's an entire industry for climate change denial.

Then you realize it never really mattered and you reach enlightenment.

talon8635•27 minutes ago

I too vacillate daily, sometimes even multiple times in a single day. It’s kind of nauseating and (for my brain type) crazy making

nullbio•21 minutes ago

The model you use is not the model they use.

genxy•about 2 hours ago

Baby shoes, never warn.

It is a threat. We need to run.

rzzzt•about 1 hour ago

Four sail: the story is clearly about the Olivebank (née Caledonia), a four-masted barque that hit a mine and sunk in the North Sea in 1939.

lowbloodsugar•about 3 hours ago

I have a very high p(doom \/ utopia) so pretty much feeling like I won’t have to worry about the future.

SwellJoe•about 3 hours ago

Given how little effort has gone into addressing climate change, doom seems more likely to me, but I doubt it'll be the autocomplete machines that do us in.

aforwardslash•about 2 hours ago

You can run doom on anything these days; running it on humanity's eulogy is no surprise :)

MentalM•about 2 hours ago

> Given how little effort has gone into addressing climate change, doom seems more likely to me

Or it is simply implies that most of decision‑making agents has formed a consensus that climate change isn't that big of a problem.

ben_w•about 2 hours ago

Renewables growth is so fast that it will exceed 100% of electricity in the early, and 100% of all form power in the late, 2030s.

It's the meat methane and cement CO2 that's now a big question.

trallnag•about 3 hours ago

We have always been back

avazhi•about 1 hour ago

I don’t worry so much about AI wiping us out as much as I worry about whether I’m being gaslit into thinking these glorified autocorrect bots are more clever than they are.

I still don’t know the answer.

MisterMunchkin•about 4 hours ago

We found a cipher my dad had written as a child with no obvious key or anything. Chatgpt was able to crack it in 20 minutes and figure out the message, and we knew it was right because it mentioned names of children he went to school with.

mythrwy•about 3 hours ago

To be fair he was a child so the cypher was likely fairly simple, maybe a Caesar cipher or similar. Cool use case though.

FergusArgyll•4 minutes ago

It's good at poking holes at my galaxy brained newfangled ideas for ciphers too. I thought I had something good, pasted the ciphertext and got a "it was embarrassingly simple..."

bawolff•about 1 hour ago

Caesar cipher is probably something even an untrained person could decode. Probably something more complex like a vigenere cipher that is still trivial to decode if you are at all familiar crptanalysis, but would look impossible to someone untrained.

FergusArgyll•3 minutes ago

Theoretically, with a long enough codeword to cipher ratio, vigenere is impossible to break (I think) (but sort of useless)

And yes, I've taught 8 year olds how to crack Caesar ciphers...

vb-8448•about 3 hours ago

> Historically, many of these problems were bottlenecked by human attention. Someone had to care enough to spend hours or days reading obscure material, testing unpromising ideas, tracing references, and trying things that might go nowhere

I wonder how many of the recent results are due to the fact that very few looked at the problem to start with. Still great results, but the general impression is that it's more about the so many low-hanging fruits than the actual capability.

glimshe•about 2 hours ago

Let's not normalize the achievement. Just a couple years ago this would be considered science fiction. We can argue that 2026 AI can't solve the very toughest cryptograms, but the fact it can solve nontrivial ones is already magical.

Now on to the Voynich Manuscript :)

chr15m•about 2 hours ago

It is indeed absolutely incredible that it can solve these puzzles given plaintext instructions with very little context.

rossy•about 1 hour ago

No, he's right. Actually, let's have a bit of sobriety when discussing the achievements of the most heavily marketed technology of all time, as published by an organisation that stands to benefit financially from the public perception of that technology. The discussion of "what made this problem low hanging fruit" is much more interesting, imo, than just breathlessly joining the hype train.

dakolli•about 1 hour ago

What's so magical about the problem... Its the exact time of problem they were built to solve (things that can be brute forced with language). I'm not impressed.

aeternum•about 2 hours ago

Yes, even many of the proofs seem to be extremely long and complicated. The Navier-Stokes proof is 57 pages of very dense math and a pretty crazy amount of code: https://github.com/openai/NavierStokesAndEuler/tree/main/Nav...

Given the close relationship between compression and intelligence, I'm somewhat surprised at how poorly the cutting edge models do with being concise.

wrsh07•9 minutes ago

You know, the first time you navigate somewhere (if you don't already have perfect directions) will probably be the longest route you'll ever take to get there

For Earth, the proof presented for NS is just our first attempt navigating from our previously known facts to the proof.

I expect we will be able to shorten it dramatically (most likely with human and AI insights), but I don't think we should read too much into the length. If you want a similar point of comparison, see the original proof (by humans) of Fermat's last theorem. It has been shortened significantly. This is normal.

chr15m•about 2 hours ago

In some ways this is similar to those game demos people get the LLMs to build. When you say "build me a cool cyberpunk FPS" you get the FPS it can build, not the FPS the author wanted, or the FPS that is desired by players. It looks impressive but that doesn't make it a good game, or the game anybody actually asked for. It's demo porn.

In the same way if you tell an LLM to go and find an unsolved cipher it can solve, of course it finds the one it can solve out of the set of all possible ciphers. Of course it finds one that uses a one time pad that is public and referenced nearby in the text.

It's the same trick used by those people who film themselves throwing a basketball backwards into the hoop. You do it enough times and don't show the misses. You pick the best one to show. It makes it look like you're a basketball genius when you aren't.

It is of course, still a cool trick. Those videos are fun to watch, and so is an LLM solving a cipher. It is absolutely incredible to live in the timeline where you can tell a computer in plain language to go and find a puzzle on the internet and solve it, and it does exactly that. It's truly a mind boggling miracle.

The first principle is that we must not fool ourself, and ourselves are the easiest people to fool. (Ht Feynman)

andai•22 minutes ago

Sometimes it hits all three.

>It looks impressive but that doesn't make it a good game, or the game anybody actually asked for.

The game I wrote manually hits 0/3.

elahieh•about 3 hours ago

I presume what the author did was plug Klaus Schmeh's top 50 unsolved ciphers at https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/the-top-50-un... into Fable 5.1 and ask Fable 5.1 to have a go. On this kind of problem it always falls back to Opus 5 anyway so I save time by starting with Opus.

The successor to Klaus's blog is Satoshi Tomokiyo's Cryptiana site, so a month ago I asked Opus 5 to scrape it all, rank them and have a go at solving some. It didn't get the ranking right. But I knew the Civil War Stager ciphers were ripe for solving, so I had it do those https://cryptiana.blogspot.com/2026/09/route-transposition-c...

The art of solving historical unsolved ciphers is knowing what is on the boundary of solvability. Since this site attracts so many OpenAI and Anthropic employees, I'll mention one that was featured by both Klaus and Satoshi in 2023, presumably Spanish transposition, which should be on that boundary but has resisted all attempts at solution https://cryptiana.blogspot.com/2023/09/a-telegram-from-switz...

chr15m•about 2 hours ago

You should probably read the article if you want to know the answer. It's in the section called "elicitation".

andai•24 minutes ago

This appears to be an euphemism for "prompting".

Also, that section is vague and doesn't explain the actual methodology.

notpachet•about 2 hours ago

Cipher noob question: is there any check that can be done to ensure a cipher is actually decodable? What if the author made a flaw when encoding it, so that it's not actually solvable?

elahieh•about 2 hours ago

Without a third-party check, nope. Case in point, Chaocipher ... https://www.chaocipher.com/ e.g. see "Progress Report #23" the PDF there. Transcription errors galore!

This cipher context "rhymes" well with Kryptos K4 in many ways.

sureMan6•about 1 hour ago

What do you mean

amelius•about 3 hours ago

> The answer was simple in hindsight. It just kept looking until it found it—and that persistence might show up in many other areas.

Sounds more like brute forcing than intelligence, this time.

SamBam•about 2 hours ago

I don't think it counts as brute forcing unless you're resorting to trying every possible solution. And clearly the LLM didn't do that here, because there would be near-infinite possible solutions.

I don't think we can really call "trying lots of different ideas for an extended period" "brute-forcing," unless we use that term for lots of humans who have struggled with hard math problems for years.

al_borland•about 3 hours ago

That seems a like the result for a lot of AI solves. It solves it due to persistence, on a problem that hasn’t been important enough for a human to invest significant time into.

scorpioxy•about 2 hours ago

That's what Terence Tao said in one of his recent videos about it. That what the LLMs can provide is scale that humans can't. The example he provided is checking many possible solutions in a short amount of time because they can review all the previous literature and, for example, rule out ones with errors. He was realistic and practical about it and said that the tools working this way can be very helpful for a human mathematician to use even if they're not "thinking". I find that to be a good balanced view that, unfortunately, seems to be rare these days. Even on this forum.

amelius•about 2 hours ago

But breadth first search combined with a good pruning/exploration heuristic has always been one of the field's (AI) main tools, so this certainly is not new.

lightandlight•about 2 hours ago

Do you have a link to that video?

prvc•about 2 hours ago

>Sounds more like brute forcing than intelligence

Do you have a criterion that distinguishes between whatever you mean by those two respective terms?

amelius•about 2 hours ago

Power (Watts).

tomrod•about 2 hours ago

This was a glorious and layered response. Thank you for making me chuckle.

Next thing you know, we'll have a WattsApp to help AIs connect and discuss.

trentor•about 3 hours ago

There is a reason even intelligent people go back to brute force for certain problems.

andai•20 minutes ago

Superintelligence ≈ Stupidity × Persistence

slashdave•about 1 hour ago

When a human solves a difficult problem by trying many approaches, we call it "persistence".

Retr0id•about 4 hours ago

> I told it to look online at some of Fable’s strongest feats, especially the math problems it has solved, and that something like this should be easy in comparison.

Fascinating. I wonder if you could show "fake news" to a weaker model and get it to be more ambitious in its attempted solutions, even if it's not fundamentally any smarter.

jrop•about 4 hours ago

I forget the story, but isn't this the origin story of one of solutions to one of the hard problems in mathematics? The story goes that the student shows up late, and misinterprets the final slide to be homework, and it turns out that the professor was showcasing a hard problem. Thinking that the slide was homework, the student takes it home and solves it.

EDIT: In 1939, George Dantzig was a graduate student at UC Berkeley studying under the statistician Jerzy Neyman. He arrived late to class one day, saw two problems written on the blackboard, assumed they were homework assignments, copied them down, and turned in solutions a few days later. He apologized for being late -- the problems had seemed "a little harder than usual."

jonas21•about 3 hours ago

Career path:

   software engineer -> prompt engineer -> positive affirmation engineer

stbenjam•about 3 hours ago

https://github.com/stbenjam/skills/tree/main/plugins/hype

I have a plug-in to do this. I don't know if it's effective but Claude said it was genuinely helpful (obviously would say that about anything)

Yizahi•about 3 hours ago

-> AI Morale, Welfare and Recreation Officer (let's be real here, heh)

CamperBob2•about 3 hours ago

    Pygmalion panderer

ademup•about 4 hours ago

I really love this idea given the recent controversy around mathematics solutions. It seems like a "mere suggestion" of success has a positive impact on finding solutions. We know this technique works in humans, from which this is all derived from, so it seems to make sense.

tcdent•about 4 hours ago

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2XcNSSgKvlE

slashdave•about 1 hour ago

“I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it—people like me.”

humbleharbinger•about 4 hours ago

Putting all controversy aside - this is a refreshing use of a model. Models are going to be a boon in the hands of historians.

layer8•about 3 hours ago

One can wonder what Urquhart would have thought if he had learned who would be solving his cypher.

GranPC•about 3 hours ago

I am trying very hard to find an original version of this cipher with no luck. It almost sounds like this whole thing is a hallucination...? Can anyone point me to a PDF of the original Cyphral Distich as printed?

SahAssar•about 2 hours ago

I don't see it in https://archive.org/details/worksofsirthomas0000urqu or https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1641-170...

I also don't find it on the site of "Klaus Schmeh" that it claims to be on a list of "Top 50 unsolved encrypted messages": https://klausschmeh.net/?s=Cyphral

Looks like the best source I can find is this: https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2014/11/17/we... which seems real-ish?

fxwin•about 3 hours ago

I found this german blog: https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2014/11/17/we...

which links to: https://archive.org/details/s9notesqueries03londuoft/page/12...

which is in reference to the original proquiritations here: https://archive.org/details/worksofsirthomas00mait/page/416/...

i had also never heard of this before today and wonder if people had even seriously tried to decipher this at all?

GolfPopper•38 minutes ago

Thank you, and SahAssar for doing the due diligence here. Like many others, I have at least a passing interest in cryptography, and I'm confident I'd never even heard of this before.

azinman2•about 2 hours ago

Let’s say it gets to the point that we reach superintelligence. All previous puzzles can be solved. But should they? Once you solve them, it’s done. What’s left? And where’s the fun and humanity?

The Olympics exist because we want to see human skill, even though jet planes exist.

meken•about 2 hours ago

No one is saying you can’t solve puzzles that have already been solved. If you love solving puzzles, then whether it has been solved doesn’t seem all that important.

yieldcrv•about 1 hour ago

I disagree, but if you and others choose to untether from our plain for these reasons, I’m totally fine representing the human traits that remain here and pass my remain traits on

matthova•21 minutes ago

I know this is a feat of AI engineering, but given the end result all I can think of when reading this is the scene from “a Christmas story“ where the kid decodes “be sure to drink your ovaltine”

johnnyApplePRNG•about 2 hours ago

Definitely a much better target to show the power of an AI LLM imho (as opposed to stealing from starving mathematicians).

senordevnyc•about 2 hours ago

You mean the NYU professor and the Anthropic researcher? Somehow I doubt either of them are starving.

gdevenyi•about 4 hours ago

Anyone pointed it at the Voynich manuscript?

veqq•about 3 hours ago

Thousands. Every day a few AI "solutions" are spammed to the relevant forums

Diti•about 4 hours ago

And at the Noita eyes. No good either.

Avicebron•about 4 hours ago

yes.

m3kw9•5 minutes ago

So it solved a obscure puzzle that looks like a weak decryption

Aboutplants•about 3 hours ago

Time to find out who Satoshi Nakamoto is

andai•19 minutes ago

I read a few years back a report that the DoD had unmasked him via stylometry (i.e. matched his writing style to forum posts).

nowittyusername•about 2 hours ago

IMO its https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scientist...

Aboutplants•31 minutes ago

“Finney died in Phoenix, Arizona, on August 28, 2014 as a result of complications of ALS, and was cryopreserved by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.”

Hmm, this guy is going to be woken up in a few decades, either one of the richest people in the world or one of most disappointed.

kirubakaran•about 2 hours ago

imho it is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Szabo

Initials match too ;)

conorcleary•about 2 hours ago

Was it sourceforge or ThinkGeek that had the code snippets?

bell-cot•about 1 hour ago

That was a throw-away name, and "he" was fabricated as part of an Nvidia demand-stimulation black op.

You don't go from being an obscure video card outfit to the #1 most valuable company on the planet by being too hesitant or dim to really get creative.

reducesuffering•about 2 hours ago

Already determined, but yes frontier models will eventually identify them confidently

machomaster•about 3 hours ago

I wonder, could current AI models solve the Zodiac killer code and how fast?

aogaili•about 3 hours ago

It is cool. But how do we know that nobody solved that problem before and it was somewhere in the training data? some blog, or some book or whatever?

altmanaltman•about 3 hours ago

Its a bit sus since there doesn't really seem to be much discourse on this either. Like okay, it solved the puzzle but the puzzle was just a key cipher with plain text? And how is this verified or even matter in terms of what it reveals? Seems more like a marketing fun post than anything susbtantial.

They published this on 31 aug and nobody in that community cared and no news covered how this 300+ years mystery was solved?

sidewndr46•about 3 hours ago

Conversely, the cipher could be so boring that no one in any academic circle bothered publishing on it.

heaney-555•about 3 hours ago

Is this going to be the cope every time this happens?

aogaili•about 3 hours ago

Haha - I'm just seriously wondering, how can anyone tell at this point?

razster•about 3 hours ago

Right, with the amount of data these models are trained on, somewhere someone may have solved it and it was in some obscure text/page no one looked at or care about. We'll probably never know.

docheinestages•about 2 hours ago

It's hard to believe that a model can nowadays solve mathematical challenges and break ciphers, yet it fails to do trivial tasks involving critical thinking, having taste, and not just running around in circles.

bawolff•about 1 hour ago

i think the "having taste" part is more an issue with the people who use AI and what they use it for, than AI itself.

tfgty•about 1 hour ago

I disagreee big time.

You’re not really understanding how the tech works if you find it hard to comprehend.

skeledrew•about 2 hours ago

Quite intuitive. Let's heart those "just a next token predictor" cries now.

lolakutty•10 minutes ago

Those cries are the corrective reaction to cries of "We are Artificial super GI now!"

And yes, it is just a next token predictor.

ex-aws-dude•about 2 hours ago

I never understand when people say that, isn’t it obvious that intelligence is an emergent phenomenon that could arise in different ways

lolakutty•10 minutes ago

Sure, but it is a token predictor, and it is not intelligent not because it works by predicting a token, but it shows dumb behavior...

LLMs are a great search tool. It searches connections in the collective human knowledge that humans have written down through all the years....

They are very good at it, and that is about it.

andy_ppp•about 3 hours ago

I wonder if people are getting it to help with Krypyos the final part? Great documentary on this code… https://youtu.be/jVpsLMCIB0Y

marseysneed•about 1 hour ago

I wonder if the voynich manuscript is next.

FerritMans•about 2 hours ago

they should throw this at the zodiac cipher

winterbourne•about 2 hours ago

Nice! I'm waiting for the day when the remainder of the Maya codices are solved by AI.

pluc•about 3 hours ago

I'm surprised Anthropic didn't steal that announcement

altern8•about 3 hours ago

Still can't align my navbar buttons correctly

0points•about 3 hours ago

AI made a zodiac-looking cipher for the headline image.

dhosek•about 3 hours ago

It’s a warning of what it’s going to do next…

kayamon•about 2 hours ago

This is insane; I've never heard of this problem before in my life, and even just reading the post for one minute I immediately thought "hey, maybe the numbers refer to something in the text?" And hey yeah, they do.

This cannot be real. This website is ill.

ramesh31•about 4 hours ago

I was watching Shatner's "Unexplained" the other day on this topic, and it hit me; there are mountains of these old mysteries out there that could be solved in an afternoon now with frontier LLMs as soon as anyone took the time to bother. Exciting times.

jdjdjdjdjd•about 2 hours ago

Don't forget to drink your Ovaltine.

Jun8•about 3 hours ago

Next up: Kryptos part 4 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos)

elahieh•about 3 hours ago

Unfortunately, the totality of the evidence very much indicates that Sanborn went "buck wild" with the enciphering, he made mistake(s), or both. So this is very much in line with the Chaocipher challenge of 1990. Nice little earner for some people though.

razster•about 3 hours ago

First thing that came to mind. I imagine this has cross their minds to.

layer8•about 3 hours ago

The article mentions it.

yuvalkarmi•about 4 hours ago

now THAT is cool!