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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

#411

Post by topato »

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".

“‘Drink… More…. Ovaltine’, It’s just a crummy ad!?!?” crumples up cypher and tosses away

Holiday movie references aside, I guess we can chalk up a few more jobs on the ‘AI Took Our Jerb’ board: secret decoder rings, secret decoder ring-factory workers, and Enigma machine operators… and I guess cryptography-based puzzle enthusiasts, but that’s not a paid position.

Another tangent, I’ve only recently realized the OTHER AI took our ______ problem: all the various hobbies that people can spend a lifetime enjoying, perhaps incrementally improving (but most likely never mastering) over the years…. which have now been made much less exciting and rewarding, now that AI can do them instantly. Art and music are two very obviously implicated hobbies, but more niche hobbies like amateur cryptography are impacted too. I’m sure there are many many other examples…

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

#413

Post by unclebucknasty »

nerevarthelame wrote: post #298

Prior to the "Elicitation" section, you'd think this article was written by a cryptographer or baroque historian who had been trying to solve this particular puzzle for years - failing embarrassingly until they presented the problem to Claude. However, as far as I can tell (I too am not a baroque historian), there isn't much reason to think this cipher was well-known or studied. But as they do eventually explain, the…

>That's potentially more impressive...

Serious question: why? Is it not just pointing it at its massive training corpus for a list of unsolved problems, and possibly even by degree of perceived difficulty? I'm trying to understand why finding the problem isn't a simple "search engine" style challenge, at which LLMs excel?

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

#414

Post by philipwhiuk »

askl wrote: post #390
GolfPopper wrote: post #387

[flagged]

You never know, the ciphertext might have contained a solution to that issue.

The medieval solutions to the king being out of money was always very straightforward.

1. Seize the gold from whoever has it

2. Punitively high taxation

Not sure much has changed

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

#416

Post by tripzilch »

emanuele232 wrote: post #375
u8080 wrote: 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.

you forget the bar was moved very far down with all the slop we're experiencing with images, music and especially code

you can't claim "you keep moving the bar", if the very first thing when an LLM drooled out a piece of code, was to proclaim "this is good enough cause it gets the job done" followed by a barrage of "we're not quite there yet but exponentials or something, so very soon it'll be incredible"

yeah, from there it sure looks like "moving up the bar"

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

#418

Post by latentsea »

scotty79 wrote: post #405
latentsea wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 find myself increasingly feeling like the burden of the lows doesn't justify the presence of the those hig…

Wow. That's bleak. For me the the initial joy of building software with AI caused possibly two happiest months of my life. And cancer caused many darkest ones. Snap out of it.

> , but everyone feels like their life/existence lost meaning

Did you miss this part? Because to me... that's fucking bleak. You snap out of it.

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

#419

Post by gilleain »

shevy-java wrote: post #406
icefish wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't see the comparison though. In the case of the Commonwealth, the UK empire was going strong and the guy was a royalist, aka supporter. The message "end the illegal war in Ukrain" aka Putin's genocide, does not really share a lot of commonalities here. If the message were to stop the Commonwealth from colonising everywhere and killing people then perhaps there would be a similarity, but I don't see the connecti…

The first English civil war started in 1642, Charles I was beheaded in 1649 and his son Charles II would not be king in England before 1660 at the restoration.

So in 1653, a 'royalist' was against the 'Commonwealth', which was the anti-monarchist side.

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

#420

Post by pembrook »

I just solved the famous 1917 Ricardo Meechum Conjecture with Astra.

Trust me when I say it’s super important to a niche area of physics. People have spent their whole careers trying to solve it.

What people? Well you or I have never met them. I swear I have a girlfriend, she just goes to a different school. But trust me it’s a super important problem.

What will this change about the world? Nothing, but trust me this is a historic event and it means these LLMs are super smart and not just brute forcing machines.

I’m certain there’s a 10% chance that brute forcing old riddles that 4 people know about might kill us. Please regulate me I’m too smart for my own good and out of control.

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