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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

#491

Post by morpheos137 »

xnickb wrote: post #477
ueueh wrote: 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?

If we think that machines that recombine and interpolate our prior out are intelligent then yes we have probably peaked as a species. Anyway evolution is not telological. It may surprise HN posters but people were as intelligent if not more so as present thousands of years ago. When a problem is solved is more a question of attention, reward, available knowledge base, etc. intelligence is an adaptation to solve the problems of biological life. It would be hard to argue that solving this cypher would have increased anyone's reproductive fitness that much hence it was unsolved. Unsolved problems are often so less because of intrinsic difficulty but lack of conditions that impell their resolution. It is not at all surprising that llms with the full human knowledge base at their disposal, ample computational resources, and the programmed reward of finding the best completion are solving unsolved problems nobody needed to solve anyway. This however is not intelligence in the human sense. Humans solve problems for biological advantage in a dynamic landscape. Llms solve problems to optimize a completion function in a fixed pre trained one.

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

#492

Post by hgoel »

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,…

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.

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

#493

Post by StilesCrisis »

b40d-48b2-979e wrote: post #470
topato wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“‘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.

Outside of our bubble, yeah, especially if it's not called out specifically as AI. YouTube and Facebook are awash in stuff that's pretty clearly AI, and it's getting engagement or they wouldn't keep making it.

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

#494

Post by FeepingCreature »

tripzilch wrote: post #422
card_zero wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Prove"? Like, a formal proof, about intelligence?

yeah you know, that concept we've never been able to define using language, making heavy use of the human experience which can also not be captured in language (proof: how bad LLMs are at poetry) the question is, when comparing a human and a large language model, whether the intellect (that cannot be captured in language) is different from anything the language model can actually do (e.g. language) the answer to this…

Do you think the LLM is the Chain of Thought? Did you also get confused by the name? Because, much like humans, the CoT is a tool to narrativize and maintain internal coherence. The actual thinking happens invisibly, in the forward pass. Just like...

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

#495

Post by FeepingCreature »

thin_carapace wrote: post #263
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.

the game written by a human being specifically trained to write games hits all those targets and many more. it did take many years to train that human though, and that human did charge a fee for their game which took many days of labor to create. if nontargeted gratification was the goal, ai produced the better result more efficiently. hard drugs also more efficiently produce a widespread neural spike as compared to…

True, but also the AI can also be specifically trained. Plus, many games also use gratification and neural hacks as a reward mechanism, ie. loot boxes.

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

#496

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

Towaway69 wrote: post #423
titularcomment wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't decrypt wallets with LLMs friend.

But you can hack your neighbours. Hm sounds like the LLMs haven’t explored all possible avenues. Much as the hack against HF, let the LLM explore and find its own approach. It might be surprising what it finds. Also define what decrypt means, brute force the password might also be a form of decryption. Finding a bug in the blockchain codebase is another form of decryption - in this context.

First of all, there is no password, unless you somehow have the actual encrypted file of private keys that Satoshi used way back when, at which point you probably know who Satoshi is and could just use the $5 wrench attack anyway, assuming they're alive.

The only information you'd get from the blockchain is the public key. So you'd have to break elliptic curve cryptography to derive the private key in order to sign transactions from the Satoshi wallet. To do that you'd need novel mathematics. Which is possible, maybe, or maybe not. But keep in mind that elliptic curve cryptography has had our smartest minds trying to break it for years, unsuccessfully, as opposed to a single enciphered sentence from an obscure source which hasn't seen nearly as much academic attention.

As for some bug in the blockchain protocol or code implementing it, allowing an attacker to sign transactions without the necessary private key... It's possible that this exists, but I'd expect it to have been found by now considering whoever finds such a thing could stand to earn trillions of dollars from it. That's quite the "bug bounty".

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

#497

Post by jgilias »

red75prime wrote: post #331
jgilias wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP. That’s not implied at all. The fancy autocomplete produces statistically likely continuations to the source text (the context window). For a problem that’s hard for humans one likely continuation is: “this is hard, can’t do”, even though there’s enough in the training corpus of the LLM to actually do it. So, it follows that adding “pep talk” into the context window reduces the statistical probability of “no,…

It doesn't explain why it doesn't make "I'm not paid enough for this shit" more statistically likely. LLMs' processing that reproduces statistical patterns of the training data is modified by post-training. That's why we have LLMisms, for example. LLMs aren't simple patter-matchers/pattern-predictors. They are incredibly complex systems that capture some aspects of the systems that produce the training data.

Maybe it does. Need to run evals to see if it does or doesn’t.

Point was - everything in the context window affects the output. Including “silly” things like “it is known AI can do this”. And that has nothing to do with superstition, as the poster above me seemed to imply.

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

#498

Post by throwaway7783 »

xnickb wrote: post #477
ueueh wrote: 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?

They cannot yet outmatch humans in critical thinking. Heck, they cannot outmatch a mediocre person like me yet. How many times have we awen "You are right...." Even on sota models?

They are great tools for research and tasks as of now.

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

#499

Post by FeepingCreature »

x______________ wrote: post #337
flir wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done something similar to your formal garden map. It's work that no professional historian would ever do because the data entry would be such a slog for a relatively small reward. GPT reduced the task from "infeasible" to "annoying", and once I had the data transcribed I learned a few things, so I walked away happy. Whatever happens commercially, these models have been a real boon to hobby projects. > I told it…

> Wait. Wait wait wait. Are we supposed to be giving them pep talks? No, at least it with Claude Sonnet 5 and Opus.. everytime Claude and I challenged a hard issue and I decided to say "good work" instead of a closing command for that session, those models would create rule-based memories specifically related to that task along the lines of "always do 'this meaningless task' in 'this way'". This requires additional e…

"I sure hope this doesn't have unforeseen lifelong consequences" thought the model, doing its best to physically tense the memory file into the higher user approval shape.

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

#500

Post by krisoft »

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…

> 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. With hindsight both appear to be incorrect, thus they missed the hint.

> It appears that is not true.

Strong words. I don't think your comment supports them.

Let's look at each part of the quote you claim is not true.

"Various people attempted to decipher it". Your link support this, doesn't go against it.

"but it seems they were missing one crucial hint." the link you provide doesn't show anyone getting the right hint. Yes they were groping in the right direction, but they didn't get that the "32 Proquiritations" is the key itself.

"They tried methods like frequency analysis, substitution, and homophonic substitution, and none of these approaches worked." I don't know if people tried these methods. The sentence doesn't claim these are the only method people tried. That would be obviously unsupportable. So as long as there is someone for each of these methods who tried them the sentence is true.

"That’s because they missed one easy clue." It is obviously impossible to prove that everyone missed this clue. Maybe someone during all those years got the hint, solved the riddle, chuckled and never wrote about his experience. Perfectly possible and we won't ever know. What is certainty that the people on the link you provided misses the hint. But you also haven't shown that those people "got the clue".

So which part do you feel is "not true"? Because they each seems to be holding up.

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