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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

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That's an artifact of it not using A-Z as it's alphabet. What you type gets translated before the AI sees it. The seventeen word the AI sees does only contain three 'e' s.

Is this true? If so, does it mean anything? Sure, it is tokenized in processing (tokens don't really have an alphabet either), but this means it did not correctly parse the problem at all if this is the case.

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

#32
post #15

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…

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…

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.

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

#33

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…

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

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

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That's an artifact of it not using A-Z as it's alphabet. What you type gets translated before the AI sees it. The seventeen word the AI sees does only contain three 'e' s.

Reading your comment, I asked it to count how many characters are in the word. It answered correctly: 9. It then also said it skipped an E in the prior chat and corrected it count to 4. It spun for 52 seconds so maybe some Python was involved.

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

#35
post #28

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?

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

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

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

#36
> 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.

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

#37
post #28

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?

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?

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

#38
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

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

#39
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...

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

#40
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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.
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