One can wonder what Urquhart would have thought if he had learned who would be solving his cypher.
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
#52We 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.
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Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
#53I wonder, could current AI models solve the Zodiac killer code and how fast?
Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
#54I 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?
Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
#55Anyone pointed it at the Voynich manuscript?
Thousands. Every day a few AI "solutions" are spammed to the relevant forums
Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
#56Anytime 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
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.
Weather is not climate. Not to mention we really don’t have roughly the same weather anyway.
Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
#57Anytime 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
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...
Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
#58> 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.
There is a reason even intelligent people go back to brute force for certain problems.
Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
#59A 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…
"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-...
Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
#60Anytime 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
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.
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.