Live data from Hacker News

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

vals.ai

561–569 of 569 posts

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

#561

I have a feeling that this simply has been in the training data somewhere and Fable just resurfaced it. From my experience Fable is incredibly dumb. It cannot even produce coherent English text and makes basic logic mistakes even Qwen 27B would be ashamed of.

>> I have a feeling

Is this the anti-AI crowd's last line of defense?

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

#562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an alternative take. Climate change, and the myriad related environmental crises, are essentially a product of human population and technology. Population will follow its course, up and then down. The wildcard is technology. Yes, AI's energy hunger is worsening things right now and that's a problem. But, personally, I can't help be hopeful that AI's sheer potential might come to invert that curve. At the very…

AI is the new god. People have started to believe that AI, when it finally arrives in its full glory, will bring some kind of salvation to humanity.

How you get that from the OP leaves me scratching my head. What they said:

>> I can't help be hopeful that AI's sheer potential might come to invert that curve. At the very least we could really use a revolutionary technology and now we may have one.

And you get "god" and "(human) salvation" out of that?

This is pure projection. Anti-AI zealots are projecting things onto the technology and its users that simply do not (generally) exist.

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

#563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding here that many LLM advocates fall prey to. No one claims (anymore) that LLMs are completely useless. We agree that these tools can boost productivity. But there is a fundamental difference between human creativity and the statistical processing of large amounts of data in an artificial neural network. The latter can yield new insights for the person operating the LLM.…

> There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding here that many LLM advocates fall prey to. I am not an LLM advocate (nor am I an LLM skeptic), I simply observe and think about what I see. So, I guess your comment is not intended for me? > No one claims (anymore) that LLMs are completely useless. We agree that these tools can boost productivity. I read this as something a skeptic would write as apologium for himsel…

I did not see a single bold claim of these discoveries or those "self-building models" that Claude and others have internally with a proof of their existence.

So yes, I am also skeptical. I think these companies are more intoncartelizing and colluding via propaganda than delivering stuff. They do deliver some, but very far from their promises.

These companies dangerously mimic behaviors I usually attribute to politicians.

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

#564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting LLMs in loops with tool calls has created tons of emergent behaviour beyond simply being a search tool

If you search randomness, you ll get any behavior that you can imagine. That does not mean that the tool is NOT doing a search. In the case of LLMs, it is not searching the whole of the randomness, but instead it just search among the grammatically correct sentences that is consistent with the existing patterns found in the existing written down human knowledge.

The thing is searching an associative memory for similar solutions and predicting what will work is not that far off conceptually from what humans do

I don’t think LLMs will reach the same level as humans but I would argue it is still a form of limited intelligence

It’s not a binary thing

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

#565
post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 assi…

This is all valid and I am with you here. However I can totally imagine kids in 10 years viewing writing code by hand same as we view making fire using flint and steel: yes can be useful, but why bother? Except in this case I fear we're losing something very important as opposed to the above example.

If you are going out camping in some form of wilderness (harder and harder every year due to the crowds), it can be very useful. I think of LLM use as the same- we'll just have different problems to solve for. Now we have to think about lighter fluid and know how a lighter works. I really don't think we've lost anything by not using flint and steel- anyone can learn how to do it in a couple minutes.

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

#566

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!

My observation isn't that solving a Millennium prize problem is not impressive.

It is the mechanism the LLMs use to do it. They seem to accel right now at quantity of work over quality of work. I'd be willing to wager there is a much simpler way to achieve the proof.

I've also seen this with code, LLMs do get the job done, but they tend to write 10-100x more code than humans to get the same job done. Still a massive value gain because they can write that much code extremely quickly.

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

#567
post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are two comments (Jan and Helmut) from 2014 under the blog post which posit that it's a book cipher. Ok? but the clue is that the key is the "32 Proquiritations" immediately before the numbers. Not that it is a book cipher. Both Jan and Helmut misses that. Jan assumes that the keys are the "names of the ancestors", while Helmut assumes that the first row are page numbers and the second row are word numbers. W…

>"Proquiritations" is an archaic, rare, or obsolete English word that refers to the act of crying out, clamoring, or making a public outcry. Because I've never seen that word before I thought I'd put that here.

I'm not sure, but Sir Urquhart may have invented the word, and he's essentially the only person to have ever used it. It's presumably based on the latin quirites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quirites

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

#568

> 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…

> There are two comments (Jan and Helmut) from 2014 under the blog post which posit that it's a book cipher. Ok? but the clue is that the key is the "32 Proquiritations" immediately before the numbers. Not that it is a book cipher. Both Jan and Helmut misses that. Jan assumes that the keys are the "names of the ancestors", while Helmut assumes that the first row are page numbers and the second row are word numbers. W…

You are giving a line by line answer to AI slop.

People should be educated about AI gotchas.

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

#569

I have a feeling that this simply has been in the training data somewhere and Fable just resurfaced it. From my experience Fable is incredibly dumb. It cannot even produce coherent English text and makes basic logic mistakes even Qwen 27B would be ashamed of.

>> I have a feeling Is this the anti-AI crowd's last line of defense?

The AI has gotten substantially worse. With Astra and Fable I am no longer able to finish tasks I used to be able to do and I revert to older models. Latest models go into reasoning loops, commit logic errors routinely and cannot even spot them by themselves and many more.

For instance I have been trying to come up with generalised model of certain non-linear behaviour and had Astra working on it for 4 days. It produced unusable garbage and gave up. Sol has got alright result in a day. Opus 5 seemed like was doing something but explanations were English like gibberish. I have not tried Fable on it, because it was a car crash in previous similar task.

Post reply on HN