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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

#521

> 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…

>"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.

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

#522
post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really, no, because if you have the right model (a book cipher) it seems it shouldn't be so hard to solve. Those Germans just didn't have time. That suggests to me that this was a fairly niche cipher, that hadn't got much attention from humans, certainly not nearly as much as more famous cryptograms (the zodiac killer's, kryptos, Elgar's, the Voynich manuscript etc.) In fact I had never heard of this cryptogram.…

"those germans just didn't have time"

That is a succinct explanation of the decoupling of human capacity for cognitive load with the expansion of global cognitive capacity made possible by AI agents.

Just as the creation of bulldozers decoupled the capacity for human labor from the global capacity for digging.

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

#523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> BUT THEY RELY ON HUMAN INPUTS humans rely on human inputs. can then talk about the small number of humans who push the boundaries of knowledge and then talk about when LLMs solve difficult math problems...

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.…

Ty for taking the time to write this as I couldn’t be bothered and can’t write it as eloquently as you.

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

#524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI solved Navier-Stokes and I was blown away. That's not what happened, go read about it harder, please.

Sure. More precisely: they resolved the Navier-Stokes Millennium problem as posed by the Clay Institute. Not sure what else "solving Navier-Stokes" could reasonably mean. A general closed-form solution probably doesn't exist. And numerical solutions have existed for decades. But of course there are still open questions like unforced solutions etc.

I suspect EdwardDiego is referring to the brouhaha about whether OpenAI's training for the model that produced the alleged solution to the Millennium Problem about the Navier-Stokes equations was trained on material that included conversations Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge had had with earlier OpenAI systems.

I think there's a bit less to that than meets the eye. Yes, OpenAI's result builds on human work. It's possible that it builds on more human work than OpenAI admitted. But even if we suppose that everything Buckmaster and Alpöge did (which, btw, was itself very heavily LLM-assisted/generated work) was a necessary precursor to what OpenAI released, it's still the case that OpenAI's clankers completed the solution and Buckmaster and Alpöge didn't.

My understanding from what Buckmaster has written about this is that the deep mathematical ideas behind their work (and presumably OpenAI's) are due to Córdoba and Martínez-Zoroa. Those ideas are in the published literature, and human mathematicians and AI systems alike are allowed to use them, and doing so doesn't mean they didn't actually do something impressive. Mathematicians build on one another's work; that's how mathematics progresses and always has been.

It may very well be that OpenAI's announcement has a serious problem of professional ethics, especially as their first version of it didn't even list Córdoba and Martínez-Zoroa in its references. (On the specific question of what if anything they learned from B&A's work before that was published: OpenAI are now claiming that after investigating carefully they are confident that the model was not trained on anything Buckmaster and Alpöge did after early July. B&A had been working on this thing for much longer than that. However, on Buckmaster's account of things it wasn't until mid-August that they got beyond what he calls "preliminary results".)

But! The results of B&A were themselves largely AI-generated. (From Buckmaster's statement: "on August 15th, we obtained the blow up results, with smooth forcing, for both Boussinesq and Euler. I can say the first LLM generated proof Levent sent me was the most horrendous I have ever read; we verified it on Lean on August 22nd. Since this point, we have been working around the clock to understand this proof and turn it into something readable." That is: the LLMs found the proof, and B&A had to work to understand what the LLMs had done. It's not that humans did the thinking and AIs just did the gruntwork. (Except in so far as one might want to give all the credit for Real Deep Cleverness to C&MZ.)

And! What OpenAI say their model has proved goes well beyond what B&A did.

I don't see any way of slicing this that makes it unreasonable to say (unless it turns out that there's an error in the proof -- unlikely, given that it comes with Lean verification, but there have been misformalizations and Lean bugs in the past and there surely will be in the future) that AIs solved the N-S problem. No, they couldn't have done it without the work of C&MZ, but again: important mathematical work almost always builds on earlier important mathematical work, that's just how it is. Yes, if OpenAI are lying through their teeth their model might have had early access to B&A's ideas -- but it seems like most of the B&A work was actually done by AI systems anyway.

It is (I think -- I am not an expert and in particular I have not so much as looked at OpenAI's publication) reasonable to say that the deepest ideas here came from humans, and that it was already widely expected that the N-S problem would be solved in the not-impossibly-distant future in something like the way it has been. So, sure, what the AIs have done here is much less impressive than if they'd settled the Riemann Hypothesis or (probably even harder) PvNP. But it's still a resolution of a famous mathematical problem that any human mathematician would have been very proud to have achieved.

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

#525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

how many humans would invent writing without being taught in school? how about algebra? how about arabic numeral-ing? and you have no idea how humans reason, but LLMs are neural networks, what do you think neural refers to?

[flagged]

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

#527
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.

Will file that away as well, seems like it could be useful in various professional contexts.

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

#528
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…

One of man's deepest needs is for progress. Video games supply this need much more readily than reality does, thereby depriving the individual of necessary drive.

Hitting the target more effectively may be more harmful. We already had that problem before AI, though.

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

#529
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This appears to be an euphemism for "prompting". Also, that section is vague and doesn't explain the actual methodology.

Synonym is the word you’re after.

I'm looking for the word you use when you've replaced an embarrassing word with a less embarrassing one.
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