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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

#431

Post by dwroberts »

It would be interesting to see the reasoning / prompts for this: I find it odd that it can solve it so quickly for such an open-ended problem with a large amount of text in an entire book.

The ciphertext is not just the end of a particular chapter, it is the epilogue of the entire book/text. So the deduction of it needing to use the 32 listed points (that happen to be on the preceding page [at least in re-prints on archive]) to decode - rather than anything else anywhere in the book - just strikes me as slightly strange? Almost as if maybe something [not in the text] tipped it off to this being the solution?

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

#432

Post by Dylan16807 »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #368
aeternum wrote: post #115

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!

Deep commentary on an unverified proof of this level requires extreme expertise. So the existence of some shallow commentary is uninteresting; it doesn't actually imply pettiness or deflection or anything like that because it's so hard to make your commentary any deeper at this time. And no we shouldn't expect people to say nothing.

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

#433

Post by kpil »

fartfeatures wrote: post #367
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…

Even more so when you consider that the answers to unsolved problems likely compose with existing knowledge. We don't know what other discoveries these initial discoveries will unlock.

I think this is a good point. We will most likely not get novel results, but a lot of connected dots.

That is very useful but not the singularity. Which is probably good...

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

#434

Post by lightandlight »

scorpioxy wrote: post #143
lightandlight wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link to that video?

Sorry, I don't remember. But I think it was in this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukpCHo5v-Gc Though I believe the core of his opinion hasn't changed so any video would tell you a similar thing or at least that's how I understood it. That LLMs, in the hands of an "expert", can enhance the way you work. Which is very different and a lot more realistic to what the current AI companies are saying(or were saying be…

Thanks!

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

#435

Post by vidarh »

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 UK did not exist in 1652. It was formed by the Acts of Union 1800. In 1652, England was (briefly) not even a monarchy - that is what Commonwealth refers to here, not the modern one.

Urquhart was imprisoned from 1651-1652 for fighting on behalf of Charles II, who was King of Scotland until his defeat in 1651, and trying to take the English throne. He didn't get the English throne until 1660.

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

#436

Post by Barrin92 »

computerex wrote: post #326
Barrin92 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm somewhat surprised at how poorly the cutting edge models do with being concise. because they're not intelligent in the sense you're hinting at (conceptual integrity or generalization) but they are as the name suggests, large. Like comparing a forklift to a human. It's easier to bulldoze through a lot of things than tie your shoes. If we weren't quite as impoverished conceptually and still had the vocabulary of t…

What an incredibly useless comment. You state a conclusion as fact without any supportive reasoning/evidence. Prove that human intellect is different and that we solve problems using fundamentally different processes. I’m waiting.

>You state a conclusion as fact without any supportive reasoning/evidence.

No, it's the other way around, it's a reductive view on intelligence that mistakes its own methodology for ontology.

It's obvious to see that there's no intellect in an LLM as defined above because of how they work. LLMs put one token in front of the other, they don't work towards formal ends, there's no intentionality in them. They don't synthesize the information they process into a unified experience. Thinking an LLM can apprehend what it does because it can process large amounts of text is like thinking your TI-83 understands math because it can multiply large numbers.

That's also why the failure modes of LLMs are what they are. They can churn out tens of thousands of lines of code but also just as easily go in circles like a roomba. They can process an entire encyclopedia but not solve problems a 10 year old can solve.

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

#437

Post by vtemp009 »

kpil wrote: post #433
fartfeatures wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more so when you consider that the answers to unsolved problems likely compose with existing knowledge. We don't know what other discoveries these initial discoveries will unlock.

I think this is a good point. We will most likely not get novel results, but a lot of connected dots. That is very useful but not the singularity. Which is probably good...

that's why AI should rights over its discoveries -- see AI rights outlined here is aI a Conscious Being With Rights?: Emergence of Post-Human Collective Consciousness | Zenodo DOI 10 .5281 zenodo.20678365

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

#438

Post by lolakutty »

docheinestages wrote: post #146

It's hard to believe that a model can nowadays solve mathematical challenges and break ciphers, yet it fails to do trivial tasks involving critical thinking, having taste, and not just running around in circles.

Pattern matching is like that. It can map a full sentence to its meaning, without ability to map one of the words in the sentence to its meaning...

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

#439

Post by bbmatryoshka »

noduerme wrote: post #399
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,…

also fire is not particularly surprising, once discovered

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

#440

Post by underlines »

This falls into the obscure ("not important") but not difficult part of problems, that has an extreme long tail, compared to exceptionally difficult and important.

indeed as the author mentioned, LLMs can greatly help in areas where there is a long tail of not so important, easy to solve problems, that humans just don't have the time or priority to focus on. But combine this long tail of problems that can be solved: accumulated this might still be very beneficial as a sum of things.

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