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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

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Adam Back.

It is against HN ethos to be make bold claims about things you know nothing about.

Unless it involves LLMs of course, in which case it’s fine to state 200 times per day that it is “obvious” that they can’t possibly do X.

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

#318

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…

For me it's more that I roll out of bed thinking how glad I am that I have Claude solve my problems and do my work, only to be pushed back into harsh reality when I sit down and try to do actual work.

I'm glad to have AI, but it is by no means a panacea, and correspondingly my p(doom) = ε.

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

#319
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assumed it was more because the LLM might echo an understandable human claim of "if it's been unsolved for 370 years, it's unlikely to be solved now/likely to need expert knowledge", which is probably a mindset that appears in its training data. The LLM likely needs to be reminded of its abilities.

> The LLM likely needs to be reminded of its abilities Like when it tells you something is 3 days of work but it can do it with some degree of guidance in a couple hours

If it’s 3 days it’s something like 15 minutes, if it’s 3 weeks, that takes a couple hours lol. Seems like there’s some sanity to the estimates after all when you think about it, it’s just the scale it gets wrong due to estimating human time.

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

#320
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

What's so magical about the problem... Its the exact time of problem they were built to solve (things that can be brute forced with language). I'm not impressed.

Why don’t you solve such problems?Being “not impressed” sounds more like a knowledge gap on your part than an informed opinion.
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