Fable 5.1 medium is so good its mind blowing.
Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
451–460 of 571 posts
Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
#452It is cool. But how do we know that nobody solved that problem before and it was somewhere in the training data? some blog, or some book or whatever?
Is this going to be the cope every time this happens?
I don't think a single person reading or upvoting had ever heard of this extremely obscure cipher until this post hit the front page, it's not "cope" to use basic critical thinking to ask questions like "was this cipher well known" and "were there many attempts to solve it before now"... that's pretty much Information Literacy 101.
Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
#453What evidence would make this a verified research result—independent replication, exact source scans, a deterministic decoding script, or all three?
Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like another case of LLMs taking credit for their training data without giving proper attribution, similar to the navier stokes case.
Except they didn't actually solve it, they just suggested it was a book cipher, which was a known strategy.
Apparently neither found it worth pursuing, and just phoned it in.
> “…leider gerade keine zeit das nachzuschauen.“
Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like another case of LLMs taking credit for their training data without giving proper attribution, similar to the navier stokes case.
Except they didn't actually solve it, they just suggested it was a book cipher, which was a known strategy.
Yes, imagine it's a book cipher and then you hand it to a tool which famously has had every book in existence cleaved apart and fed into it.
Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Conspiracy" requires an unlawful or wrongful purpose. Please assume that the op was run from a jurisdiction where using a pseudonym on the internet was not illegal, and various sorts of influencer and meme marketing were well-accepted practices. Really, compared to an animated tiger telling kids that sugar-laden Frosted Flakes(tm) are "Great!", Task Peppermint was positively benevolent.
Do you really believe it?
In the True Conspiracy Theorist sense of Believe? No. It's an obvious Follow The Money theory, with Nvidia being particularly topical, a few "how might a rational business exec do this?" details, and Task Peppermint thrown on as an amusement. I could say something similar with (say) Britain's GCHQ as the mastermind - though their motives would be less clear.
Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
#457> 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…
That is like crediting a fan posting on Twitter "he should run it in for a touchdown instead of taking 3 points" instead of the coach who decided and implemented a play which actually won the football game.
Not really, no, because if you have the right model (a book cipher) it seems it shouldn't be so hard to solve. Those Germans just didn't have time.
That suggests to me that this was a fairly niche cipher, that hadn't got much attention from humans, certainly not nearly as much as more famous cryptograms (the zodiac killer's, kryptos, Elgar's, the Voynich manuscript etc.)
In fact I had never heard of this cryptogram.
I don't think this is all that demonstrative of AI power, more than what we already know from coding prowess.
It is, however, a great counterexample to the often heard assertion that short cryptograms can't be decisively solved because they have too many possible solutions.
Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
#458> 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 :)
This was a basic cypher that effectively no one cared about. It wasn't famous or particularly notable.
I would say, the only reason it was never solved was because not enough people actually cared about it to begin with.
This isn't a big accomplishment.
Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
#459> 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…
Seems like another case of LLMs taking credit for their training data without giving proper attribution, similar to the navier stokes case.
Agreed, pr and nothing more. Just more stealing from big corps
Re: Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
#460> 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…
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