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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

#551

Post by beepbooptheory »

krisoft wrote: post #500
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. 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 to say, in the spirit of intellectual charity and curiousity. There is no one to impress here!

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

#552

Post by anthonyrstevens »

fsckboy wrote: post #543
ahf8Aithaex7Nai wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding here that many LLM advocates fall prey to. 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 himsel…

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" - Issac Newton, in a 1675 letter to Robert Hooke

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

#553

Post by nerevarthelame »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #413
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…

> That's potentially more impressive... Serious question: why? Is it not just pointing it at its massive training corpus for a list of unsolved problems, and possibly even by degree of perceived difficulty? I'm trying to understand why finding the problem isn't a simple "search engine" style challenge, at which LLMs excel?

"Potentially more impressive than solving an unremarkable cipher" means just that. I'm not suggesting that it's groundbreaking new capability never before seen in LLMs.

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

#555

Post by anthonyrstevens »

emanuele232 wrote: post #377
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Navier-Stokes proof is 57 pages of very dense math > how poorly the cutting edge models do with being concise LLMs solve a Millennium prize problem. People complain the proof is too long, within a week. What a time to be alive!

"if llms are so intelligent why is cancer still not cured?"

I'm waiting for the inevitable: "Well, LLMs only cured a few types of cancer"

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

#556

Post by geraneum »

krisoft wrote: post #500
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. 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.

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

#557

Post by tim333 »

chmod775 wrote: post #241
glimshe wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

"AI solves niche thing you've never heard of" is a daily headline at this point. What's genuinely cool isn't that AI managed to solve some specific problem only a handful of people even cared about, it's that humanity can now cheaply clean up its backlog of such things.* That does not mean that specific instances of it are still very interesting though. This article is the "I had claude vibecode a thermostat for my b…

The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems weren't that obscure.

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

#558

Post by anthonyrstevens »

qlte wrote: post #452
heaney-555 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this going to be the cope every time this happens?

I don't think a single person reading or upvoting had ever heard of this extremely obscure cipher until this post hit the front page, it's not "cope" to use basic critical thinking to ask questions like "was this cipher well known" and "were there many attempts to solve it before now"... that's pretty much Information Literacy 101.

I think the point is that rather than YOU finding out the answers to those questions, and post only if the answers were indicative of some "gotcha", someone ALWAYS posts something similar to your OP as a lazy/low-effort way to discredit LLMs.

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

#559

Post by inoop »

gdevenyi wrote: post #8

Anyone pointed it at the Voynich manuscript?

Word length distribution and complete lack of inter-word predictability (i.e. word n has zero predictive power towards word n+1) seems to indicate it's a hoax.

Of course some people will say that these properties simply don't surive whatever encoding/encryption that was employed, perhaps at least partly because they prefer to believe there's some secret message waiting to be uncovered.

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

#560

Post by bbor »

jackeee1 wrote: post #508
bbor wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your opinion is contradicted by overwhelming scientific consensus. Hearing a plausible assertion should not be enough to believe it, friend.

Another founder of an AI slop firm talking slop.

Please leave HN. Reddit misses you.
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