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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

#471

Post by singularity2001 »

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.

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

#472

Post by ueueh »

qoez wrote: post #430
geraneum wrote: post #400

> 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.

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.

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

#473

Post by Closi »

KingMob wrote: post #448
qoez wrote: 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.

Except they didn't actually solve it, they just suggested it was a book cipher, which was a known strategy.

And it's not like it was a load of detail either, it's a comment on a blog 16 years ago.

You don't get points for throwing out a possibility for the type of cipher, you get points for solving it.

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

#474

Post by benmmurphy »

fpgaminer wrote: post #281
derektank wrote: post #246

So, does anyone have any intuition for how concerned we should be that one of leading foundation models will be able to successfully attack the gold standard symmetric and public key encryption algorithms (AES, ChaCha, ECDH, Kyber, etc.) in the next few years? As a consumer of crypto that doesn’t understand the mathematics deeply, I’m getting kind of nervous that we’re going to wake up one day to find that the backbo…

It's unlikely that any of the modern cryptographic primitives will break over night. First, modern encryption isn't susceptible to "this one weird trick!" like the early days. ChaCha isn't even a cipher. It's a key stretcher. Which means, even if you broke the math behind ChaCha, its inherent complexity means its still widely dispersing the original key across the cipherstream. There just won't ever be enough key mat…

If you look at elliptic curves I don't think there has been any big changes in attacks for 20 years but some attacks like MOV or SMART would have been fatal to EC if they had applied to more curves. So maybe there is some unknown attack that applies to all curves or applies to a small subset of curves that happens to overlap the curves we use. If you are super paranoid you should probably use curve25519 because then at least you can be confident it was not deliberately engineered to be weak. it could still be weak by chance but presumably the designers did not have enough flexibility to choose the parameters to make it weak. Some people are paranoid about the NIST curves because there is no verifiable explanation for where the seeds came from. But if the NIST curves were made weak then I think its a situation where theoretically anybody could find the weakness which is very dangerous. I don't think it was possible to create a no-body-but-us backdoor for the NIST curves.

Also, even if DLP is hard for the curves we use algorithms like ECDSA might be a bit fishy. Unlike schnorr signatures there is no proper security reduction for ECDSA.

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

#475

Post by fg137 »

fxwin wrote: post #68
GranPC wrote: post #54

I am trying very hard to find an original version of this cipher with no luck. It almost sounds like this whole thing is a hallucination...? Can anyone point me to a PDF of the original Cyphral Distich as printed?

I found this german blog: https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2014/11/17/we... which links to: https://archive.org/details/s9notesqueries03londuoft/page/12... which is in reference to the original proquiritations here: https://archive.org/details/worksofsirthomas00mait/page/416/... i had also never heard of this before today and wonder if people had even seriously tried to decipher this at all?

Which makes me wonder, other than the author and maybe two other humans on the earth, does anyone care about the cipher or the success?

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

#476

Post by criley2 »

monk_grilla wrote: post #73
bluebarbet wrote: post #64

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…

> we could really use a revolutionary technology [to address climate change] We have it. We've had it for a long time. We've had several such technologies, take your pick: solar, nuclear, hydro, wind. The technology is not holding us back, politics, ignorance and greed are. I'm not at all hopeful AI will help us with any of those three very human flaws.

It's nice to call it "politics, ignorance and greed" but those three are just "Capitalism".

Our system is doing exactly what it is designed to do. Nuclear reactors were never profitable compared to coal or gas, so it never succeeded in strongly capitalist societies, only seeing great success in socialist economies where the people can invest outside of a profit motive.

It's actually quite funny that socialism is saving the day. The mega-capitalist countries turned their backs on nuclear and solar because they were less profitable than gas and coal. But socialist China invested anyway, and now China is mass producing nuclear reactors and every layer of the solar stack. China produces 50% of all nuclear reactors, 90% of all solar panels, 90% of all battery systems for solar storage.

Now that a socialism-based society has proven market viability, suddenly the greedy capitalists want in. But they're decades behind and don't have the private debt appetite to compete.

Womp womp... At least someone is leading the energy revolution.

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

#477

Post by xnickb »

ueueh wrote: post #472
qoez wrote: 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.

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?

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

#478

Post by nautilus12 »

I was thinking to myself this dismal thought: everyone is so busy because of the acceleration caused by AI that no one will have the time to actually take the five minutes to verify manually that this really is a solution or that the article just generated something plausible looking

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

#479

Post by criley2 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #266
monk_grilla wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we could really use a revolutionary technology [to address climate change] We have it. We've had it for a long time. We've had several such technologies, take your pick: solar, nuclear, hydro, wind. The technology is not holding us back, politics, ignorance and greed are. I'm not at all hopeful AI will help us with any of those three very human flaws.

Solar efficiency and cost has really only become economical in the last decade or so, and battery and inverter technology to make it practical for home use or grid interconnect about the same. Wind and hydro are location-dependent, and solar is somewhat also. Nuclear was vehemently opposed by environmentalists throughout the 1970s and 80s, they successfully stopped almost all new projects.

Solar only became "economical" (read: profitable) because a socialist economy dumped a huge amount of money into scaling it up without requiring it to be "economical". It could have been half a century or more ago if we actually cared.

Nuclear was not stopped by the environmentalists, it was stopped by the fact that it cost 4X more than coal at the time. You claim that solar wasn't profitable in the west, thus it didn't take off, surely you can also see that nuclear wasn't profitable in the west, thus it didn't take off as well.

The same country that invested the time and money to make solar profitable is also investing the time and money to make nuclear profitable, with nuclear reactors entering mass production...

It was never about "economical", it was about a system being mature enough to make long term investments. Ours simply can't do that anymore.

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

#480

Post by joshuahedlund »

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…

> all the various hobbies that people can spend a lifetime enjoying

I disagree. AI took chess literally decades ago now, and more humans enjoy playing it now than ever before.

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