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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

#121

Post by chr15m »

elahieh wrote: post #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 an…

You should probably read the article if you want to know the answer. It's in the section called "elicitation".

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

#122

Post by amelius »

prvc wrote: post #84
amelius wrote: 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.

>Sounds more like brute forcing than intelligence Do you have a criterion that distinguishes between whatever you mean by those two respective terms?

Power (Watts).

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

#123

Post by notpachet »

elahieh wrote: post #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 an…

Cipher noob question: is there any check that can be done to ensure a cipher is actually decodable? What if the author made a flaw when encoding it, so that it's not actually solvable?

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

#125

Post by chr15m »

glimshe wrote: post #97
vb-8448 wrote: 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…

Let's not normalize the achievement. Just a couple years ago this would be considered science fiction. We can argue that 2026 AI can't solve the very toughest cryptograms, but the fact it can solve nontrivial ones is already magical. Now on to the Voynich Manuscript :)

It is indeed absolutely incredible that it can solve these puzzles given plaintext instructions with very little context.

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

#126

Post by MichaelNolan »

ben_w wrote: post #85
SwellJoe wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given how little effort has gone into addressing climate change, doom seems more likely to me, but I doubt it'll be the autocomplete machines that do us in.

Renewables growth is so fast that it will exceed 100% of electricity in the early, and 100% of all form power in the late, 2030s. It's the meat methane and cement CO2 that's now a big question.

I think your prediction is a bit early. Maybe a decade early. 2033 is 7 years away. The transition is happening really fast, faster than most people (or political leaders) know, but not that fast.

We will hit 1TW per year of new solar soon, but to get to 100% electricity by the end of 2033 I think we would need closer to 3TW per year.

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

#127

Post by ojo-rojo »

baron3dl wrote: post #103
stavros wrote: 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.

This is actually a new skill I've been working on. Learning how to elicit concise and simple speech from models (and from people to!).

Whenever I come to a wall of complicated text I kick into gear and think through getting it to distill this into the high-level useful bits that I actually need to know.

I guess I could create an actual agent skill for this :) And next-gen models might eventually be trained to simplify their output themselves...

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

#128

Post by tren »

elahieh wrote: post #59
redfloatplane wrote: post #3

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…

"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…

It's a shame that I have to run a local model to decipher Opus, but them "dumber" models read far more naturally - https://github.com/gvzdv/claudish-to-english

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

#129

Post by stavros »

jsw97 wrote: post #118
stavros wrote: 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.

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.

Well, whatever its thinking block looks like, this is when it was talking to me. I suspect you're right, though, I think it thinks it's thinking.

It seems like it doesn't have enough of a theory of mind to know that other people don't think exactly like it thinks.

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

#130

Post by throw1235435 »

taberiand wrote: post #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

Generally most technologies have increased the use of energy and therefore accelerate climate change. May be an unpopular opinion but in general more energy demand and ways to use energy increases climate emissions - they are strongly correlated even with renewables coming on stream.

AI, being the super hungry energy monster it is right now, in my view accelerates this trend not reverses it. Even with renewables the need for reliable, stable power in a dense form (data centres use A LOT of power per sqm) means lots of land clearing, energy for construction, cooling/pumping, chip manufacturing and other uses. All want stable quick to deploy power due to the AI race (e.g. fossil fuels).

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