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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

#391

Post by fxwin »

geraneum wrote: post #374
fxwin wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

its not quite the correct method though, the commenter suggests using the first row as a page index, and the second row as the word index, but the actual solution was using both rows as word indices within the 32 paragraphs ("Proquiritations") paired to the 32 numbers in each row

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

#392

Post by SweetSoftPillow »

omnicognate wrote: post #389

That's pretty cool, especially the fact that it chose the problem itself. The uncovered text, though: > O GOD UPHOLD KING CHARLS THE SECOND AND MAKE HIM THE SUPREME RULER OF THIS LAND That's like working out a cereal box cipher and finding the message is "Do your homework and tidy your room".

Homework text is much more useful than uncovered text.

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

#393

Post by scotty79 »

omnicognate wrote: post #389

That's pretty cool, especially the fact that it chose the problem itself. The uncovered text, though: > O GOD UPHOLD KING CHARLS THE SECOND AND MAKE HIM THE SUPREME RULER OF THIS LAND That's like working out a cereal box cipher and finding the message is "Do your homework and tidy your room".

Message might have been a bit spicier if King Charles II ended up in a bad spot and our history was written by his enemies rather than his upporters.

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

#394

Post by icefish »

omnicognate wrote: post #389

That's pretty cool, especially the fact that it chose the problem itself. The uncovered text, though: > O GOD UPHOLD KING CHARLS THE SECOND AND MAKE HIM THE SUPREME RULER OF THIS LAND That's like working out a cereal box cipher and finding the message is "Do your homework and tidy your room".

It was published in 1653, during the Commonwealth. So faintly equivalent to finishing your book with "End the illegal war in Ukraine" in modern-day Russia.

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

#395

Post by [deleted] »

scotty79 wrote: post #393
omnicognate wrote: post #389

That's pretty cool, especially the fact that it chose the problem itself. The uncovered text, though: > O GOD UPHOLD KING CHARLS THE SECOND AND MAKE HIM THE SUPREME RULER OF THIS LAND That's like working out a cereal box cipher and finding the message is "Do your homework and tidy your room".

Message might have been a bit spicier if King Charles II ended up in a bad spot and our history was written by his enemies rather than his upporters.

[deleted]

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

#398

Post by vidarh »

icefish wrote: post #394
omnicognate wrote: post #389

That's pretty cool, especially the fact that it chose the problem itself. The uncovered text, though: > O GOD UPHOLD KING CHARLS THE SECOND AND MAKE HIM THE SUPREME RULER OF THIS LAND That's like working out a cereal box cipher and finding the message is "Do your homework and tidy your room".

It was published in 1653, during the Commonwealth. So faintly equivalent to finishing your book with "End the illegal war in Ukraine" in modern-day Russia.

The other cryptogram mentioned on the page is even "worse" - it's clear the garbled word is meant to be or refer to Cromwell specifically calling him an ursurper.

Looking up his biography, he presumably wrote the first while imprisoned for fighting in support of CHarles II, and the second would seem to have conveniently been published around the same time as he left for continental Europe.

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

#399

Post by noduerme »

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…

It's not particularly surprising that if you:

(1) take a 300 line NN algorithm,

(2) throw a quarter of the world's GDP + all literature ever collected at using the algo to train a NN

(3) throw another quarter of the world's GDP at billions of teraflops for inference, and

(4) aim the resulting world's-largest-computer at marketing itself to investors, for instance by decoding ciphers from obscure medieval manuscripts,

that you could perform some pretty magical tricks. There are other feats humans have performed for less cost, like sending people to the moon, or landing a rocket vertically, or idk, curing Polio.

I'm not knocking the "miraculous" advance here. The unique thing about the solution which makes it particularly non-trivial and something that humans would struggle with was exactly what LLMs excel at: Diffing loads of texts against each other. But the 176k tokens at around $10 doesn't tell the story of the cost. It says a lot about the externalized cost and the amount of money flowing in to support the hardware. If they'd put a $100,000 bounty out to solve that cipher, I think the internet would've solved it in a couple days.

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

#400

Post by geraneum »

> Various people attempted to decipher it, but it seems they were missing one crucial hint. They tried methods like frequency analysis, substitution, and homophonic substitution, and none of these approaches worked. That’s because they missed one easy clue.

It appears that is not true.

Someone here [1] has found a [German] blog [2] writing about this cipher. There are two comments (Jan and Helmut) from 2014 under the blog post which posit that it's a book cipher.

Here's one of those comments [in German]:

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

I find it curious that the article here claims that people have attempted to decipher it and lists a few methods that are quite similar to what’s proposed in the comments under that post, except for those two comments.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49689516 [2] https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2014/11/17/we...

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