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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

#371
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

and also state 200 times per day that it is "obvious" that they will be able to do X in Y time

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

#373
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's good at poking holes at my galaxy brained newfangled ideas for ciphers too. I thought I had something good, pasted the ciphertext and got a "it was embarrassingly simple..."

It’s actually insane that we accept a product that bullies us. They are tools and should act as so

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

#374
post #68
post #54

I 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?

I found this german blog: https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2014/11/17/we... which links to: https://archive.org/details/s9notesqueries03londuoft/page/12... which is in reference to the original proquiritations here: https://archive.org/details/worksofsirthomas00mait/page/416/... i had also never heard of this before today and wonder if people had even seriously tried to decipher this at all?

In your first link one of the comments says:

> Die Lösung müsste eigentlich mit Hilfe des Buches zu finden sein (..who worthily will hear or read this book..)

And there’s another one that says:

> jeweils 32 zahlen pro reihe. erste zeile seitenzahl zweite zeile wort? oder umgekehrt? wär mir als erstes in den sinn gekommen. leider gerade keine zeit das nachzuschauen.

So people have seen and proposed the method already in 2014 that it’s keyed to the book but had not had time to pursue a solution.

* Edit: Typo

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

#375
post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. This may be some niche thing that I've never heard of but a) it's still non-trivial; it still would have been science fiction to solve it a few years ago, and b) have you already forgotten the Navier Stokes drama? That is not some niche thing I've never heard of. It kind of blows my mind how quickly people have forgotten both the state of AI in ~2010, and the outlook . If you had asked 100 people in 2010…

"Yeah it is just token predictor, it could not even beat top 0.01% domain experts so it does not count as intelligence"

that's the point, it is clear the the bar to determine if llms are useful / intelligent is being moved every time these systems improve, but it is starting to fell like people are in denial. we are seeing significant progress, at a rate we are absolutely not used to experience.

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

#376
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 :)

Humans are incredibly good at adapting. A few days ago AI solved Navier-Stokes and I was blown away. Now I'm already thinking: "Well, it was only a counterexample and it brute-forced its way to it." lol

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

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The Navier-Stokes proof is 57 pages of very dense math > how poorly the cutting edge models do with being concise LLMs solve a Millennium prize problem. People complain the proof is too long, within a week. What a time to be alive!

"if llms are so intelligent why is cancer still not cured?"

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

#378
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 :)

"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 b…

Aren’t many of the greatest problems obscure to the lay?

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

#379
post #54

I 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?

I googled for "cyphral distich" before:2026-08-30, and found barely anything that was relevant. Mostly incorrectly dated pages about this exact thing. In fact, the only instance I can really find is this website, which seems to be an archive of a magazine issue from 1927 https://toebes.com/Flynns/Flynns-19270813.htm (it also has a scan of the original text of the magazine in the top right). This facebook post https://www.facebook.com/groups/2600net/posts/46775529324677... seems to indicate it is found in at least one edition of the book

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

#380
post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Yeah it is just token predictor, it could not even beat top 0.01% domain experts so it does not count as intelligence"

that's the point, it is clear the the bar to determine if llms are useful / intelligent is being moved every time these systems improve, but it is starting to fell like people are in denial. we are seeing significant progress, at a rate we are absolutely not used to experience.

They deny what: that they're very impressed, that they think it's cool, that their minds are blown, that they really really like it? Denying these things is allowed, you know.

Edit: if you're going to try to stage an intellectual wrestling match on the topic of is this thing awesome or not, you might as well make it a proper wrestling match and maybe get greased-up Turkish style. It would be more entertaining and you'd be more likely to arrive at a meaningful conclusion.

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