541–550 of 571 posts
Now that programming is solved, math is solved, and this is solved, can we solve Alzheimer's next please?
It always downgrades to Opus 4.8 because apparently solving Alzheimer's should be left to big pharma?
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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.
First, it’s AI can’t multiply 4-digit numbers.
Then it’s AI can only, by brute force, get silver in the IMO with specialized systems.
Then it’s OK, well, now a general-purpose model can get gold, but it’s still just the IMO, it’s for high schoolers.
Then it’s OK, it can solve a few trivial Erdős problems, but only because nobody seriously tried them before, they were low-hanging fruit.
Then it’s OK, a lot of serious mathematicians tried this one, but the result was still obvious in hindsight, it just combined knowledge from a thought-to-be-unrelated field, if any human knew that, they would solve it.
And then to OK, but there are still Millennium Prize Problems.
Then OK well it's just Navier-Stokes wake me up when its the Riemann Hypothesis.
Then-
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> 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.…
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 himself: "I am stubborn and stick my heels in when presented with something new, first at productivity, but when forced to retreat, now taking a stand at creativity."
but again, you are defending/attacking a point that doesn't apply to me. I wrote originally to say "they learn from humans" was not a good argument against LLMs because humans learn from other humans. (a simple point which was why my comment was simple)
Very few humans are Aristotle, Newton, or Einstein, and those three were as well building on the work of others.
Let’s say it gets to the point that we reach superintelligence. All previous puzzles can be solved. But should they? Once you solve them, it’s done. What’s left? And where’s the fun and humanity? The Olympics exist because we want to see human skill, even though jet planes exist.
Right. The existence of jet planes doesn't invalidate Olympics. Why would the existence of machine solutions invalidate human puzzle solving?
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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?
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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 don't see it in https://archive.org/details/worksofsirthomas0000urqu or https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1641-170... I also don't find it on the site of "Klaus Schmeh" that it claims to be on a list of "Top 50 unsolved encrypted messages": https://klausschmeh.net/?s=Cyphral Looks like the best source I can find is this: https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2014/11/17/we... which seems r…
> 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…
It does appear there have been some people who have looked at this before but it’s unclear how many(here’s an example of a request from readers in 1927 https://toebes.com/Flynns/Flynns-19270813.htm ). That said there is another controversy brewing with this that is best summarized here: https://vera-wren.github.io/posts/2026-09-11-the-key-is-a-pr...
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It does appear there have been some people who have looked at this before but it’s unclear how many(here’s an example of a request from readers in 1927 https://toebes.com/Flynns/Flynns-19270813.htm ). That said there is another controversy brewing with this that is best summarized here: https://vera-wren.github.io/posts/2026-09-11-the-key-is-a-pr...
'Best' is putting it strongly for an autonomous claudish summary of an autonomous claudish rebuttal to a claudish write-up of the finding
> 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…
Let's not normalize the achievement. Just a couple years ago this would be considered science fiction. We can argue that 2026 AI can't solve the very toughest cryptograms, but the fact it can solve nontrivial ones is already magical. Now on to the Voynich Manuscript :)