Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
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Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
#2> 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.
Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
#3A 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.
Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
#4> 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.
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."
Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
#5Putting all controversy aside - this is a refreshing use of a model.
Models are going to be a boon in the hands of historians.
Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
#6I 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.
Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
#7> 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.
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.
Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
#8Anyone pointed it at the Voynich manuscript?
Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
#9> 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.
Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
#10Anyone pointed it at the Voynich manuscript?
yes.