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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

#571

Post by lolakutty »

ex-aws-dude wrote: post #564
lolakutty wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is not Intelligence. It is pattern matching.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49694427

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

#572

Post by Grimblewald »

The best kept secret is the one you keep to yourself, and yet you'll find cryptographers an awefully chatty lot. So much so they run out of digital realestate on common platforms and create a plethora of sites to call their own. It seems extremely likely this problem wasnt solved by fable so much as recalled and nothing offered to date indicates one should expect this to not be another debased marketing lie. Gpt2 was evidently not too dangerous to release. Strawberry didnt get gold in matholympiad. SWE still isnt solved. AGI still not here. AI still cannot reliably be trusted to order a fucning pizza without a script. Nothing novel has been done by these models, and why would one expect it from a thing that interpolates by design? Perhaps in a high enough dimension an iterpolation might look like extrapolation to us mere mortals but we're not there yet.

I guess im just sick of the fact we keep entertaining attention whoring of the most basic variety.

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

#573

Post by Obscurity4340 »

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.

> compose

Did you nean to type that or did you mean composed or comport?

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

#574

Post by jackb4040 »

hgoel wrote: post #492
noduerme wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

It's funny we're already at the "actually this isn't very impressive" stage when it was a little over a year ago when we were making fun of LLMs for not being able to add numbers. IC production takes a vast amount of resources and wealth, and it's a known quantity (after all, we've been doing it for decades), but it's still impressive what modern fabs can achieve.

Afaik LLMs still can't add numbers. They've just had their system prompts updated to make them use a tool call for any arithmetic.

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

#575

Post by jackb4040 »

chr15m wrote: post #120

In some ways this is similar to those game demos people get the LLMs to build. When you say "build me a cool cyberpunk FPS" you get the FPS it can build, not the FPS the author wanted, or the FPS that is desired by players. It looks impressive but that doesn't make it a good game, or the game anybody actually asked for. It's demo porn. In the same way if you tell an LLM to go and find an unsolved cipher it can solve,…

It can build a C compiler or browser if you don't know or care that it's a buggy collage of the dozen or so existing open-source C compilers or browsers, with no bearing on its ability to solve novel problems for your business.

In the months since those original stunts were pulled, the same playbook has been applied to the math and infosec spaces with some degree of success, and to the medical, legal, etc. etc. with less success. Nothing about the technology has fundamentally changed, but the labs hope that they can squeeze the same juice out of other markets that they did out of software so they don't have to delay their IPOs again.

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

#576

Post by qlte »

singularity2001 wrote: post #471
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…

"THE Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher" Yes, this language always insinuates it's a well-known thing even though no one ever heard of it, other than two people on the far side of Europe.

And now you'll see comments name-dropping it like "...if AI has plateaued then please try to explain how just last week Fable solved the legendary Chyphral Distich, after humanity's top cryptographers had been trying and failing for almost 400 years??"

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

#577

Post by andai »

Seattle3503 wrote: post #288
andai wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes it hits all three. >It looks impressive but that doesn't make it a good game, or the game anybody actually asked for. The game I wrote manually hits 0/3.

Did you get anything out of the attempt?

Yeah, that's a great question. I should probably write about it properly, if only to structure my own thoughts.

The main thing I gained was the wisdom that comes from the pain of doing it wrong.

The most painful lesson was finding out I was more attached to the idea that I had a validated product, than to actually having a validated product. (And treating marketing as an afterthought... lmao)

Also if I had realized how long it was going to take, I would have taken a very different approach. I accidentally took my R&D mindset into production, which... might have worked, if I were immortal and retired!

In short, aim to ship 10x sooner, because everything takes 10x longer than you think. (Reality has 100x more detail than it ought to.)

On the bright side, I also learned to put one damn foot in front of the other, persist despite the horror, and finish the damn thing.

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

#578

Post by krisoft »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #551
krisoft wrote: post #500

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…

Why write a sentence by sentence exigesis like this? The text you are responding to is right above where you are writing. Who is going to miss that context? Is there something more that you want to communicate other than that the linked page does not in fact solve it the way the LLM did? Writing more does not in itself make a comment more thoughtful! We are all presumably on the same page here, just say what you want…

Because the annotation is making it clear what exact part of the comment I'm referring with each part of my answer.

> Who is going to miss that context?

On hacker news? Anyone. Sometimes you blink and there are 200 different comments between the comment you responded to and your response. Often going into different tangential directions. People reading your comment have to trace subtle variations in padding to follow the thread of a conversation.

If you read HN with open eyes you can see confusion and misunderstanding caused by this every day.

> just say what you want to say

I do. Thank you. And I will say it how I want it.

> Writing more does not in itself make a comment more thoughtful!

Of course! You have to write the right words. What you are seeing in my comment is a one line opinion "Strong words. I don't think your comment supports them." surrounded by my analysis of why I think them. This way you can not only see how I come to this conclusion but also what information I considered.

If we were agreeing I could just write "yup". But because I disagree with the comment of geraneum, i better be precise what I'm disagreeing with and in which way. Exactly in the name of intellectual charity and curiosity.

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

#579

Post by krisoft »

geraneum wrote: post #556
krisoft wrote: post #500

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…

> but the clue is that the key is the "32 Proquiritations" immediately before the numbers You're conflating the solution with the methodologies, which is what the article is listing in the original quote. The rest of your response is predicated on this mistake.

> The rest of your response is predicated on this mistake.

You have to tell me more. Which part of the text you quoted you think is not true?

That various people attempted to decipher it? Or that they were missing a crucial hint? Or that they tried the listed methods?

The quote is not claiming that these are the only methods people tried.

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

#580

Post by krisoft »

postexitus wrote: post #568
krisoft wrote: post #500

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…

You are giving a line by line answer to AI slop. People should be educated about AI gotchas.

Could you be more clear on who or what you are claiming to be AI slop?

Are you saying that geraneum's comment is AI slop?

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