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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

#111
post #52

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.

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

#112
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wouldn't candidates use AI, like they used social media ads, to win?

They already do. Llm is just an algorithm. Dont worry, you've been lied to algorithmically at least since the 90's.

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

#113
post #46

> 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.

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.

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.

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

#114

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

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

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

#115
post #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 abo…

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.

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

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Speak for yourself. I would much rather work for and elect AI.

I for one welcome our AI overlords :D think about it, I'm with you on this one; an AI wont have petty issues or unresolved trauma when managing people, only hallucinations and blackouts. So a cocaine/meth addicted 80's boss from an it sitcom.

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

#117
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

It's often simply misleading / bad writing. Here's one I just got about some crashes:

"If the crashes stop, the factory overclock is marginal; run a small negative offset."

This looks like it's saying: "If the crashes stop then we know the factory overclock is marginal." (This makes no sense.)

What it's trying to say is: "If the crashes stop then we can run a small negative offset, because the factory overlock is marginal."

What I would write: "If the crashes stop, we can avoid crashes by underclocking slightly. The speed difference between that and factory clock is marginal."

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

#118
post #77
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

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.

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.

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

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 huma…

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.

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

#120
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)

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