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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

#241
post #97
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 :)

"AI solves niche thing you've never heard of" is a daily headline at this point. What's genuinely cool isn't that AI managed to solve some specific problem only a handful of people even cared about, it's that humanity can now cheaply clean up its backlog of such things.*

That does not mean that specific instances of it are still very interesting though. This article is the "I had claude vibecode a thermostat for my bathtub" of cryptography.

* And in this case I'm not sure it even meets that bar. For all we know a couple readers back when the book released had a delightful afternoon with it, solved the riddle, then forgot about it.

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

#242
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?

My intuition is no, the family of cipher methods (even those that could be implemented by hand) is too open-ended, so there's no particular statistic that you could expect to see for all solvable ciphers and no unsolvable ciphers.

The definition of solving a cipher must be something like getting a highly meaningful result (like intelligible natural language text) by applying a process with relatively low Kolmogorov complexity relative to the length of the output. If you don't have a constraint like that, it could literally be meaningless what should count as a solution. For example, a cipher that was encrypted under a one-time pad can be successfully decoded to any plaintext just by choosing the appropriate key; there's no reason to prefer any plaintext over any other unless you have external knowledge that constrains the plaintext and/or the key. (That's what it means for the one-time pad to be information-theoretically secure, which is the lack of a constraint that helps distinguish a "good" solution from a "bad" solution.)

Basically you could say that every cipher is a transformation of a plaintext with some kind of computer program. (The human who invented the cipher may not have thought of it as a computer program, perhaps because computers hadn't even been invented yet, but there should be an equivalent program to the encipherment and decipherment process.) A good solution in that Kolmogorov complexity sense is like "a short program produced a meaningful decryption". There are statistical methods to recognize some kinds of plaintext, and there are statistical methods to recognize properties of specific ciphers (for example, to guess the most likely length of a Vigenère key), but it doesn't seem that this can inherently generalize across "all possible programs".

But if you want to limit the family of ciphers to specific things like Vigenère or Playfair or something, then yes, there are good statistical tests. It's just that it creates a higher-order question of how much flexibility the cipher creator could have had to choose a cipher method, conceivably including one that isn't attested anywhere, or one that has more good security properties of some kind than other classical ciphers did.

It seems like this will intersect with historical research, like "well, I don't think that so-and-so was actually sophisticated enough to literally create an interesting new kind of cipher from scratch, so therefore if this is a real message, it's probably one of these methods that would have been known in that cultural environment at that time and place", which maybe is enough of a constraint to have decent statistical tests. But we still have some idiosyncratic things like the Voynich Manuscript where experts have been fighting for decades over the baseline question of whether it's actually an enciphered human language plaintext!

The worst case problem is not even an error in encipherment but the idea that the apparent ciphertext could literally be random (chosen by throwing dice or spinning a wheel or drawing letter tiles or something), so there's no form of meaningful decipherment possible by any means, even with the original creator's knowledge.

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

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was a throw-away name, and "he" was fabricated as part of an Nvidia demand-stimulation black op. You don't go from being an obscure video card outfit to the #1 most valuable company on the planet by being too hesitant or dim to really get creative.

This is one of the best conspiracies I've ever heard...

"Conspiracy" requires an unlawful or wrongful purpose. Please assume that the op was run from a jurisdiction where using a pseudonym on the internet was not illegal, and various sorts of influencer and meme marketing were well-accepted practices.

Really, compared to an animated tiger telling kids that sugar-laden Frosted Flakes(tm) are "Great!", Task Peppermint was positively benevolent.

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

#244
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sometimes! Modern AIs have very limited metaknowledge - they don't know exactly where the limits of their capabilities lie. So you can get things like "a task is doable for an AI, but the AI thinks it's impossible, so it doesn't try hard enough". Usually you get the opposite - AI overconfidently trying at tasks it has no conceivable way of reliably solving, falling far short, and failing to self-check, fail gracefull…

> So you can, in fact, get better performance sometimes by applying some variant of "assume this problem is solvable" or "other problems like this were already solved by AIs" pep talk. Not always, far from it, but it does happen on the occasion with frontier capabilities.

Are you superstitious?

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

#245
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.

How is that not plain English? why do my friends not like me? Hmm....

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

#246
So, does anyone have any intuition for how concerned we should be that one of leading foundation models will be able to successfully attack the gold standard symmetric and public key encryption algorithms (AES, ChaCha, ECDH, Kyber, etc.) in the next few years? As a consumer of crypto that doesn’t understand the mathematics deeply, I’m getting kind of nervous that we’re going to wake up one day to find that the backbone of TLS has been shattered.

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

#247
post #87

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.

> Given how little effort has gone into addressing climate change, doom seems more likely to me Or it is simply implies that most of decision‑making agents has formed a consensus that climate change isn't that big of a problem.

For them maybe - rich enough and or old enough to avoid the problem. Big problem for the rest of us

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

#248
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.

I'm constantly using the "Extract this in basic technical terms, be succinct and assume the reader has technical knowledge"."

Because good lord, does claude waffle when left to its own devices.

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

#250
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What commercial interests and big businesses are driving climate change fear?
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