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Discussion (278 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Edit: Found it from here: https://mvueh-enigma-solved.carterl.chatgpt.site/
(Is it possible that this is a misreported detail? It feels like a singular ROSENOW would be an equally effective crib)
> it suspected that the plaintext of Nr. 173, SIPVX, might be related to the plaintext of the unbroken MVUEH message
It makes sense that Nr. 172 and Nr. 173 might be related since they were sent at around the same time.
In Nr. 173, "ROSENOW ROSENOW" was also present.
It also makes sense that a longer crib would generally be more effective than a shorter one.
A sibling commenter explained it - Rosenow is both a municipal name and a district name, so naturally it would be repeated. (Like "New York, New York")
It would seem to me that the odds of looking for even a single ROSENOW in the decrypted message would be plenty. The odds of a single ROSENOW randomly occurring in incorrectly decrypted output are vanishingly small. So it seems to me that looking for ROSENOW is a safer bet vs. looking for ROSENOW ROSENOW -- a single ROSENOW is a great sign you've got the correct key, whereas looking for ROSENOW ROSENOW seems like it would deliver false negatives (think of all the times we say "New York" rather than "New York, New York")I'm a novice at crypto though, so, maybe I've got that totally wrong.
Breaking enigma is often about using lucky or educated guesses to heuristically reject large chunks of keyspace to leave the remaining keyspace computationally tractable.
Note that the key (lol) complication with this message seems to be that it had a wheel rollover that most messages do not have to deal with, and that rollover drastically reduces how much you can reduce the potential keyspace using all the techniques noticed by the original crackers.
The wheel rollover I think just requires more brute force. Unfortunately, this might be an example of OpenAI the company having vastly more compute time and effort than your average enigma nerd. For example, modern compute clusters like supercomputers can tractably brute force enigma with no cleverness in like a day or less, while home computers would still take thousands of years to compute that. It's very scalable. Did astra have access to significant compute?
However, even considering that, the inferences made by the LLM are good, and picking this specific message to attack, precisely because it should be soluble but might have had an extra wheel rollover that made it more computationally intractable for hobbyists but not a large company is a clever thing to do for the LLM.
I don't think this applies, isn't this just the researcher using ChatGPT Codex on their machine?
(apologies for my broken learner German, I decided not to use a translator).
Stubborn for a long time because the message used a completely different key from the rest of that day's traffic. Everyone assumed it shared the daily key. The original transcription had errors. The left rotor turned over at letter 72, which is rare and breaks standard crib attacks.
What is cool, if true, is that it was a 2 day collab between the Leffer and Astra. To me this shows the importance of human in the loop, was still all also showing how immensely power of llm tools. But I think it’s getting a bit silly how much anrticles ignores the driving force (the person) in breakthroughs like this.
"However, the most astonishing thing about this break is that the GPT–6 Astra did it entirely on its own."
"Carter Leffer only directed GPT–6 Astra to see if it could break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page."
awesome! keep going
great work! keep going
Even when the report literally says the LLM did it on its own?
Let's not over-correct in the direction of knowing better than the first party.
Not mention it also says this...
> We are still analysing the GPT–6 Astra logs to see exactly how it executed the break.
For everything else, there’s Astracard
"After analysing the unbroken messages on the website, it decided that the most promising message was Nr. 172, MVUEH and it also quickly suspected that the plaintext of Nr. 173, SIPVX ..."
Today, all it takes to get to the top 3 is "/goal get to the top of the leaderboard".
The human-in-the-loop is only a temporary measure until the models get good enough.
Just like with Kasparov's Centaur Chess, the idea of a 'human in the loop' is just a necessity due to current limitations.
There will hopefully (?) come a time one day when human beings provide only ultimate value judgments, and everything else is done by machines. Or it may not.
But I don't think betting your ego on the idea that you will be useful in the loop for very long is very wise.
I do expect centaurs to outperform other systems for many types of tasks for years to come (and am kind of betting on this to keep getting paid).
But what I'm talking about is ego. It your ego is tied up with (a) your intelligence or (b) your ability to perform task X; you will probably be humbled this century.
This? Still? After everything?
Buddy, you're living in the future. In a science fiction novel. Please get used to it.
That's not correct for the content.
"However, the most astonishing thing about this break is that the GPT–6 Astra did it entirely on its own. Carter Leffer only directed GPT–6 Astra to see if it could break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page."
Therefore Astra could also have done this comment better
Hearing a guy built his home in a week with the power of nails and a hammer would have been novel in era of mortise and tenon.
I actually found an article about raving about how fast nail production was thanks to machining advances in 1790 and that it would bring great value: https://digital.libraries.psu.edu/digital/collection/pabookn...
It’s seems to me humans haven’t changed, just which machines we praise.
Technically you built it yourself and the builder was just a minor collaborator?
"However, the most astonishing thing about this break is that the GPT–6 Astra did it entirely on its own. Carter Leffer only directed GPT–6 Astra to see if it could break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page."
I mean... I'm all for collaboration but I think this case is pretty clear, no?
Now we just code in english and the computer does the rest.
The shortcomings should really be obvious by now to anyone honest. And the marketing distortion being oushed out is just tiresome and detrimental for all of us.
I think this sounds somewhat less silly in English because "automotive" and "automative" don't have the same hyper-visible affinity, but all the same; you may want to consider the car as a more viable analogand.
Don't people actually read anymore?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsBZOcqZerk
And then I come to hackernews and well, not quite, but I'm sure that one will be done shortly too.
The YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@doranchak/videos by David Oranchak, one of the people who solved the Z340 cypher, has some more details on this as well as how the Z340 cypher was cracked.
I think the more accurate description of what's happening is that access to expertise is becoming commodified.
Well, let them have these. They'll play around with open problems which generate media hype and then they might run out and move on to something else, because "AI came up with a problem and solved it in 3 days" won't have the same effects as "AI solved a problem in 3 days that humans couldn't solve in 100 years".
P=NP has always been drastically over stated as it's "Importance". It pretty much only exists as "That small technical detail that people with no domain knowledge think is important because youtube videos always focus on the trivial, 101 level cool fact stuff". Math focused CS people of course would always love any proof, but most people expect already that P!=NP, and no proof of that would be very meaningful, as it basically would not change our understanding of anything in the domain currently. It would be nifty, but not earth shattering.
Also the problems LLMs are attacking are resulting in proofs that don't seem particularly enlightening, so that's unfortunate.
However, there's always the tiny tiny chance it is P=NP, and any proof of that, regardless of how insightful it would or would not be, would be worth going fucking insane over. Just knowing that would be meaningful on it's own, and give us limitless work to do, and puts lots of mathematicians in an awkward spot.
I would be considered an AI skeptic because I'm not currently sacrificing myself at the altar of LLM companies, but if LLMs solve P=NP in any direction and even uselessly so, I think that's a good excuse to take days off work and party!
John Henry.
There's a reason we made folklore about when the machines came for the strength of men, and now 150 years later it comes for our minds.
Only if you subscribe to the "humans are special" rhetoric, in which case I'm - maybe - sorry to say the feeling will only intensify.
Without the human intellect to emulate, LLMs would be nothing.
And used to build the LLMs of today. We'll see how that evolves once LLMs have to feed LLMs with their own "intellect".
There used to be days when women would make blankets, when men would make chairs, when children would make brooms...
But PROGRESS I tell you!
But reform always has its victims. Like the textile workers who starved in the streets centuries ago, and me, kicked to death in the street by AI today...
So not any different from right now.
>definitely not available to humanity as a whole.
[taps on forehead meme]
The whole of humanity can have it available, if there is a whole lot less humanity.
Why?
> But also, whatever benefits are unlocked will be owned mostly by a small group of individuals, definitely not available to humanity as a whole.
It's unclear to me if this is the good scenario or bad scenario. This would be good in your view right? At least I hope you're right.
Do any of the people proclaiming this shit actually use these models? No matter how many headlines are coming out, every day I deal with reams of the most horrific code I've ever seen technically compile, with routine mistakes that any human would get fired for if they made.
Seriously though, it ends up looking like that. To take a stupid example a couple of weeks ago I asked an agent to look at porting my hand written WebGL renderer (+ shaders etc) to WebGPU. It estimated a human would take 6-10 weeks, and I would agree. (Which is why I hadn't done it). 24 hours later it was deployed and live. This is classic tedious, difficult, low level if quasi mechanical work (rather like cracking an enigma message), and LLMs absolutely fly through it.
You do understand this is intentionally trained into recent models for marketing purposes? "Wow, it saved me months of work in a day! This is the most amazing technology ever!!!!"... is what it intends to evoke by underpromising and overdelivering. I routinely have it helpfully suggest it will take something like "three engineer-months" to do something I do by hand without any LLM assistance in a day. The estimates may be accurate if you have literally never touched a computer in your life before and are starting to learn from there.
My dear sir, can you please lay out a dissertation of what this intelligence you speak of actually is. You seem to be much more informed than most of us here and therefore surely have made great contributions to furthering science and the arts.
/snark
It's difficult for me to be any less snarky than this even though it's not really wanted here on HN as you are pulling a kind of reverse snark. For example if I myself have lots of experience in subject X, and then by analogy apply it to subject Y to do something new in that subject, that would be called intelligent, and that would be pattern matching.
Pattern matching is a foundational building block of intelligence. You cannot have intelligence without pattern matching. Pattern matching alone is not general intelligence and requires more parts to work like that.
AI probably don’t dream of electric sheep but then again we don’t know. Perhaps we can find it out.
Perhaps AIs can figure out how to distribute wealth more fairly so that we can all dream of real sheep.
Intentionally philosophical PoV, what else is left for us monkies.
/s
The smartest humans now need to move to being less concerned about status games among humans and more with how to provide value to a mix of intelligent machines and humans. i.e. if you're starting an SaaS in 2026 you better be assuming half your revenue is going to come from machines acting by themselves.
I'm personally not sure if it can come with original thinking and techniques to solve completely novel problems. For that, some imagination and thinking outside the box are required, and I doubt the current architecture can do any of this.
But I think that is what makes it so good at coding, because coding and building software in general has a lot of repeated problems in different context. Same thing for human lives, many think their story or situation are unique, but reality is that the shape of human life has been repeated many many times.
I'd say novel math or scientific theories..let us say we send a robot to space, and we ask to build a colony. A lot of the challenges this robot will face will be novel, it could use inspirations of what humans did on earth, but it might get stuck when things don't work as expected and training data has nothing to build on..but then again we might teach it how to run experiments etc, which would result in data that it can use..but some of those experiments might require imagination or breakthrough in understanding..my guess is that it will get stuck there...
General relativity is harder, but Poincare was somewhat oriented in the right direction. Perhaps AI can discover the final step.
Quantum mechanics is harder. You need like 25 years and a few unintuitive leaps to discover it. I guess it's too hard for AI in 2026, but remember to check again in 2027.
I expect that there is some relatively easy-to-state solution to this problem, but that it's different in form from what most existing proofs and tools yield. Perhaps if I dumped millions of dollars into it an agent might chance on the solution. Or perhaps my luck is such that my fun little problem is truly intractable...
Um, I'm not sure if you've noticed, but we have bipedal robots that walk and run rather well now.
https://docs.nvidia.com/learning/physical-ai/index.html
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/use-cases/robot-learning/
"Prove or disprove string theory in pure mathematics, reply in Caveman speech"
All the news from the CERN including the Higgs boson include under the hood those transformation or a slightly more modern variant.
The hard part is mixing General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
I think you mean general relativity, connecting quantum mechanics with special relativity is just QFT
It's a brilliant idea, of course. But being considered "impossible" means it was considered previously and decided to be impossible. No?
I mean, crpytographically, it's ultra-trivial. You "just" need to solve the logistical issues of (1) shortwave radio existing (2) figuring out how to make sure your field agents possess and are not caught with the disposable one-time codes. I am surprised anybody would consider that impossible.
(I hope I am not downplaying the brilliance of the one-time pad idea itself)
Reminds of what Einstein said, imagination is more important than knowledge..might be his deepest insight ever.
Being trained on a mountain of stolen material for guessing cribs helps. Up to now no group had that much funding to steal. Congratulations.
When you design a new thing it will have a dozen drawbacks and a dozen and one benefits. If people then have a bias that everything ai is bad, the signal won't be strong enough to convince.
There's some debate over to what degree current generation AI can be creative at all, or whether it can only crawl around its latent space and explore within constraints. One might ask: were all the solutions to all the math problems AIs have solved already "there" latent in the training data and just hadn't been spotted by humans and put together?
But then... isn't everything latent in our training data if training data is "all observations made about the universe?"
But then... what even is creativity? That gets into philosophy and metaphysics. Creativity, like consciousness and sentience and self-awareness, is not a rigorously well defined concept. So to a degree we don't even know how to ask the question of whether these things are creative.
This gets interesting.
One of the things I love about AI is the glittering Pandora's box of philosophical questions it poses.
Another one I love: if LLMs and their relatives are not, in fact, sentient or self-aware or alive in any way whatsoever (which I suspect is true given how they work), then it means intelligence and consciousness are unrelated phenomena. I'm pretty sure every animal and maybe even every living things has consciousness in some form, but my pet bunny rabbits definitely can't write code. LLMs can write code, but I don't think they experience existence or have volition.
IMO we have always implicitly just assumed some kind of connection between intelligence and consciousness because we have both. It was just an assumption. It's probably a false one.
I suspect (a hypothesis) that consciousness is a property of life and is probably emergent from life's intimate relationship to thermodynamics and the arrow of time. Life has also evolved intelligence because it's useful to satisfy its implicit survival goal function, but the two are unrelated. Intelligence is just an adaptation.
Whenever I hear "AI can never" I know I can disregard them as an unserious person when it comes to anything around AI, learning, or philosophy.
Then see if it can come up with E=mc^2
a preprint just three weeks old with my question
what voodoo is this lol
maybe I picked up the relativity idea subconsciously from somewhere, but I don't recall it specifically, I thought I was being "clever" that it would be a good test
It seems like even yesterday that the threshold for impressing someone is that the machine would have to be good at pretending to be a person. Now the threshold is that they have to be able to invent special relativity.
but was there enough knowledge by 1903 to truly figure that out?
or was it a leap in conscious realization that a machine could not emulate (yet)
(pretending to be a person is harder than math imho, much harder)
Based on what's publically available, they're focusing on hacking uncontesting orgs using misconfigured sandboxes and math puzzles.
Your statement is essentially unfalsifiable. We can't possibly discuss whatever Sam Altman is doing in his private office room, nor should we assume OpenAI is working on anything other than what has some public traces.
I think they should now focus on robotics, so it can do my dishes while I work on fun math games.
why would they compete with Nvidia on that?
There’s this bizarre lesson that humanity is gona learn - much of life in many respects is already automated. And that small % of what is non-automated will be kept to have some semblance of feeling human and useful.
There’s already a lot of fake jobs and output of zero value - nobody bats an eyelid.
I think the publicity is a nice to have. They need models like this for in-house use.
Technically, this isn’t OpenAI directly.
There are many things I want to do - that would require me to hire a team of 50 people.
I don’t want to do that nor can I afford to. Can OAI focus on enabling me to do this? I don’t care about this other stuff.
Just like many things in life - if it doesn’t show up in the economy it’s irrelevant.
> Despite the seeming difficulty in decrypting its messages, Enigma contained a number of design issues that left patterns in the cyphertext. Poland first cracked the machine as early as December 1932 and was able to read messages prior to and into the war. Poland's sharing of their achievements enabled the Allies to exploit Enigma-enciphered messages as a major source of intelligence.
Ok interesting, so why do people talk about Turing in this connection then?
> Turing devised techniques for speeding the breaking of German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bomba method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine
Ok so Turing just improved an existing method. Without being an actual expert it's impossible to know how much credit he actually deserves.
Two more references: the Polish method was called "Bomba" [3] invented by Marian Rejewski [4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_(cryptography)
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski
GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipher
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49763987
Also: Why should we assume Terra, GLM or any other less SOTA and less expensive model wouldn't have been able to do the same?
And it's very possible Terra or GLM could crack it, turn off their web access and try yourself.
I never said this. All I said is we don't have the conversation and therefore we can't determine how easy or hard of a problem it was.
> And it's very possible Terra or GLM could crack it, turn off their web access and try yourself.
I'm questioning why this should be labeled "Astra" breaking anything implying it required "the best" model to do it when in fact any other half-decent model might have been able to do this as well.
EDIT: Okay seems like the actual prompt is published, just not on the same article that was linked. Maybe I'll give it a try.
5.6 Sol is much more capable.
-hype or fear monger
-release the scary all-knowing model
-milk subscriptions and api in the first two months or so
-nerf the said scary model and use the excess compute and money acquired in an “internal model”
-internal model make hype or fear monger
-repeat
They don't care about the advancements themselves, only that the advancements are some sort of cheating that shouldn't "count".
Humanity is profoundly unsettled by AI and is responding with avoidance and denial.
It’s another dot com bubble, not a crypto bubble. Trillion dollar valuations burst once you leave lesswrong.
Edit: very fancy autocomplete. I know what these things are capable of. It’s still not “intelligence”, for X definition of intelligence. And it certainly benefits from having obscene amounts of compete thrown at it. It is awesomely impressive synthesis of data, yet it’s clearly still that.
Complete this sentence: "You can solve world hunger by..."
Intelligence is required to finish sentences. It's not just a Markov chain.
The internet was pretty important afterall even with a bubble.
I think the quote above is best as written, with a big emphasis on the "if"
I'm pretty AGI-pilled, and I feel perfectly emotionally prepared for if AI stayed at its current capabilities and the S&P dropped 25%.
Is ClosedAI running out of money or what is going on?
This for me, isn't interesting, it required no skill, no imagination, in fact it seemed like it happened by dumb luck.
So we have entered an age where an army of know-nothings direct models to old forgotten tasks so they can get 15 minutes of un-deserved attention?
What? Why? This has been my bar for my entire life, and I've never been bored for a single second.
[1] https://www.prinzai.com/p/gpt-6-astra-solves-a-wwi-german-ra...
I agree with you that these are not "trilling" discovery but they can be worth something anyway.
Like you, I do not like this news also because I think they will be used to just "push" the next two IPOs (Anthropic, OpenAI).
At best, dumb brute force computation power.
It is about as meaningful as news that a computer found the 10....0th digit of Pi.
So like half of all useful human inventions are to you not interesting just because it happened by dumb luck?
Take someone from a few hundred years ago and drop them into today, and if they don't go catatonic and die, then they'd tell you that we created magic. "Wow, you live in a world of magic and all you do is bitch about it".
>"You're flying! You're sitting in a chair, in the sky!"
A machine running a loop through an expensive LLM for an undisclosed amount of time, which cost an undisclosed amount of money, which was told to keep looping into a solution was found, for a problem that nobody was very concerned about... That just seems like PR, and it's not so interesting.
Lets stop and think about this, there is now a machine that can solve a bunch of problems that have not been solved simply because there wasn't enough people with knowledge to work on them, and all we have to do is supply power to get the answers?
Irrational hate causes one to be blind.
Qwen 3.7 max, gpt 5.6 sol, fable 5.1, gemini 3.8 flash decoded the message in one shot for me... There is nothing special about astra doing something here
I blantly threw request to decode the messaage in qwen 3.7. Used via api with couple simple generic system prompts like "be concise", nothing special. Prompted as
Decode
``` BTTE UM ANGABE DES MARSQWEGES X BEFINDE MIQ IN X ROSENOW ROSENOW X SOFORT FUNKANTWORT X WASCHBBSCH ```
--- response (I trunkated the output to conclusion only)
"BITTE UM ANGABE DES MARSCHWEGES. BEFINDE MICH IN ROSENOW. SOFORT FUNKANTWORT. [UNCLEAR/END]" Translation: "Please provide the marching route. I am located in Rosenow. Immediate radio response required. [Unclear]"
---