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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

#461

Post by notpachet »

dolmen wrote: post #442
notpachet wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cipher noob question: is there any check that can be done to ensure a cipher is actually decodable? What if the author made a flaw when encoding it, so that it's not actually solvable?

Actually the article that you didn't bother to read mention a few encoding errors that Fable has been able to recover and point to the probable author's intent.

I did bother to read it, and that isn't what I meant. I wasn't referring to one-off errors that you can fix after successfully decoding a cipher into something that produces a majority-correct answer. I meant something more akin to what schoen's answer touched on: whether there are any closed-form mathematical/statistical analyses that can be performed ahead of time to assess the structural legitimacy of any ciphertext before you spend a lot of cycles trying to decode it.

Thanks for the driveby snark though!

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

#462

Post by r_lee »

cruffle_duffle wrote: post #268
derektank wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible that the first message is more information dense/less likely to be ambiguous than the latter? It’s clearly being selected for for some reason, maybe it’s an artifact of the tokenizer or specific training data, but I don’t know. If the use of jargon was complete cruft, I would expect it to be selected against during reinforcement learning

You’d think that, I thought that… but then I realized I’m just kidding myself thinking its output makes sense. It doesn’t. It doesn’t. Sometimes it might as well just speak tongues. In other words, it ain’t you. It’s the model. It’s just genuinely bad. Then you switch to ChatGPTs lineup and realize how things can actually be better. It took about a week to really get the feel for how to use their models… then I basic…

yeah, I just switched to the GPT models and it's a breath of fresh air.

as for the other guy, the claude talk is definitely not less ambiguous, it often is incredibly ambiguous and hard to parse, I have no clue why it produces such output, if not to fingerprint it?

it's really weird man. when Opus 5 came out, I was really confused. I saw a bunch of hype about how it's better than fable, but I just felt frustrated with it, although at times it'd do fine, but especially in Claude Code it'd just delve into the whole "load bearing" type of lingo real fast and I'd get a headache.

I don't think it's worth using even if it scores 2 points higher in some bs benchmark

it's definitely surprising how the magic and smoothness of 4.6 and such is no longer there with the >5 models

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

#463

Post by rurban »

anshumankmr wrote: post #417
rurban wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All solved already, without AI

Not all of them actually. The one with his name is not solved.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/zodiac-killer-cipher-solved

Kayr, this guy found.

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

#464

Post by usrusr »

topato wrote: post #411
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…

That view has been accompanying me for a while as well. Difficult to really put a finger on it, because what I'm thinking of are fields where "enthusiast dilettantes" did not have their joy in honing their skills in the slightest way affected by the existence of trained professionals so much better than them. But when anyone can just throw a few ktoken at it, that joy has to be, uhm, "renegotiated".

I guess sub-fields with little tool use won't be affected a lot, tool-heavy sub-fields.. might pretty much be over. (think playing the guitar at a campfire vs going wild on a set of TB-303 + TR-909 vs going wild on emulations thereof)

The other "ai took our..."

I like that term, I have been looking for a while now and haven't yet been been able to come up with a better one.

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

#465

Post by MadxX79 »

JoshTko wrote: post #345
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…

I wonder though how much of science has similar issues, that there are hundreds of semi-promising but niche areas that require tons ton of deep analysis that would have simply cost too much to explore all areas, but now become feasible.

The Navier-Stokes proof cost ~10mio USD in tokens at consumer prices, and it was something that the two people working on it were allegedly weeks or months away from solving. You can buy ~200 Math PhD Years for 10Mio USD, so it doesn't seem like a shortcut at all (actually it sounds like we would have gotten the same solution for ~1-0.1% of the price if we had just been a little patient.

We weren't willing to pay for 200 math PhD students to try to find singularities in Navier-Stokes, I am skeptical of how much we would be willing to pay OpenAI to do research on "niche scientific areas"?

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

#466

Post by loopydosuette »

Likely solved several times over in several parts of the world.

This will happen a lot.

People assume and even predict that some collectors' pieces will be worth tons of money. People did that for centuries.

Now big corps are gonna buy up those undisclosed solutions for top dollar.

gg, well played to the people who didn't and don't need the credit.

bbng to the corps who need that to fake progress in the field and of their models. booooo! booooooo! you should be ashamed of yourselves! booooo!

PS: even nobody needs none of those "I can fuck over idiots plays. Everybody needs proper progress, research, investigations, smarter users. It's 2026. That qualitatively cheap money will only breed more cheap money and more cheap users and suppliers! Who the hell wants their neighborhood or planet to have more of the cheap stuff? What the hell happened to these peoples' brain circuits? Somebody should investigate! (maybe some tech journalists are already on it!? ...)

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

#467

Post by throw1235435 »

eru wrote: post #349
throw1235435 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They use a small amount of land per MW used. The fact that space isn't a constraining factor in power demand, and demand for AI compute seems to be insatiable at the moment, means that there is less of a "land constraint" to use even more energy. If they actually required a lot of land they would be less viable and AI progress would be slower IMO. Just means even more data centre's will be built - this is where the J…

Solar power is currently the cheapest power anyone can add to the grid in most places.

But not dense w.r.t energy generated. Where will you put it? Panels on a data centre aren't nearly enough to power that data centre. And data centres are not tolerant of variable power. Even with batteries that just means you need even more power for times when renewable output is low.

Cheap power is one thing. Quality reliable power at mass scale is quite another. These things chew through a LOT of power and most people don't understand the sheer scale of it. I've seen a local one (a medium AI data centre) take up 2% of the whole cities grid and there's plenty more to come around here including a 1GW one (10% of the whole city's power in only 0.005% approx of the city's whole space) which cleared wildlife reserved land to build. Even a few of these things compete massively for trades people, commodities, power and other infrastructure pricing locals out. They are talking about using evaporative cooling as well putting pressure on water supply.

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

#469

Post by Levitz »

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,…

[dead]

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

#470

Post by b40d-48b2-979e »

topato wrote: post #411
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…

    Art and music are two very obviously implicated hobbies
Do you think anyone likes "AI" art and music? It's pretty widely reviled.
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