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

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481–490 of 569 posts

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

#481
post #450

> 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.

[flagged]

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

#482
Huge chance I'm underestimating how many of these there are, but where do people find all of these unsolved equations/ciphers/etc?

Is there some sort of enumerated list somewhere that we can run as a test suite and then we can make a bigger deal about the percentage of that list that we're burning down as these models improve?

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

#483

> 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…

Amazing example of how human intuition oft causes overlooking -- but AI doesn't miss anything in its rigor

Hahaha, AI rigor.

Wait, you're serious?

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

#484
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Humans are incredibly good at adapting. A few days ago AI solved Navier-Stokes and I was blown away. Now I'm already thinking: "Well, it was only a counterexample and it brute-forced its way to it." lol

> AI solved Navier-Stokes and I was blown away.

That's not what happened, go read about it harder, please.

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

#485
post #450

> 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.

Weak argument, with an absurd analogy trying to make your point.

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

#486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's so magical about the problem... Its the exact time of problem they were built to solve (things that can be brute forced with language). I'm not impressed.

Why don’t you solve such problems?Being “not impressed” sounds more like a knowledge gap on your part than an informed opinion.

Why are you so toxic?

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

#487
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,…

The ability of the algorithm to absorb billions of dollars of training effort is itself the major breakthrough of the transformer architecture.

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

#488
post #430

> 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.

I would argue that elaborating on scattered bits and pieces found here and there throughout the Internet is enormously valuable. Fair attribution is the tricky part.

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

#489
post #477
post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Listen there’s no doubt LLM’s are powerful. BUT THEY RELY ON HUMAN INPUTS. It’s getting tiresome seeing the same bull shit over and over. The labs have invested hundreds of billions and now need to show RSI. It’s not happening and won’t happen. Without continual new information supplied by humans the models would freeze.

The question for me is where it leaves innovation. Have we really peaked as a species that we so easily want to give up on the young and hand them over a tool that would substitute reasoning? Call me naive or old, but I don't see a need to think critically when you have a tool that can outmatch you in that. I tried drawing analogies with Chess, but it doesn't work. Shall I ask AI to do that for me?

> The question for me is where it leaves innovation. Have we really peaked as a species that we so easily want to give up on the young and hand them over a tool that would substitute reasoning?

This is a crucial question but I'm afraid the ship has sailed. We should focus on how to prevent atrophy and cultivate our skills in spite of LLMs. For me and many others this means doing thins the old way with occasional assistance from LLMs that actually increase our understanding. Occassional because if you do it often, you get intellectual atrophy because you stop even trying.

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

#490
post #472
post #430

Earlier 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.

Yup. Listen there’s no doubt LLM’s are powerful. BUT THEY RELY ON HUMAN INPUTS. It’s getting tiresome seeing the same bull shit over and over. The labs have invested hundreds of billions and now need to show RSI. It’s not happening and won’t happen. Without continual new information supplied by humans the models would freeze.

Your opinion is contradicted by overwhelming scientific consensus. Hearing a plausible assertion should not be enough to believe it, friend.
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