Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher • Hacker News Board

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

#571

Post by lolakutty » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 5:05 PM UTC

ex-aws-dude wrote: post #564

lolakutty wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you search randomness, you ll get any behavior that you can imagine. That does not mean that the tool is NOT doing a search. In the case of LLMs, it is not searching the whole of the randomness, but instead it just search among the grammatically correct sentences that is consistent with the existing patterns found in the existing written down human knowledge.

The thing is searching an associative memory for similar solutions and predicting what will work is not that far off conceptually from what humans do I don’t think LLMs will reach the same level as humans but I would argue it is still a form of limited intelligence It’s not a binary thing

It is not Intelligence. It is pattern matching.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49694427

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

#572

Post by Grimblewald » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 5:45 PM UTC

The best kept secret is the one you keep to yourself, and yet you'll find cryptographers an awefully chatty lot. So much so they run out of digital realestate on common platforms and create a plethora of sites to call their own. It seems extremely likely this problem wasnt solved by fable so much as recalled and nothing offered to date indicates one should expect this to not be another debased marketing lie. Gpt2 was evidently not too dangerous to release. Strawberry didnt get gold in matholympiad. SWE still isnt solved. AGI still not here. AI still cannot reliably be trusted to order a fucning pizza without a script. Nothing novel has been done by these models, and why would one expect it from a thing that interpolates by design? Perhaps in a high enough dimension an iterpolation might look like extrapolation to us mere mortals but we're not there yet.

I guess im just sick of the fact we keep entertaining attention whoring of the most basic variety.

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

#573

Post by Obscurity4340 » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

fartfeatures wrote: post #367

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…

Even more so when you consider that the answers to unsolved problems likely compose with existing knowledge. We don't know what other discoveries these initial discoveries will unlock.

> compose

Did you nean to type that or did you mean composed or comport?

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

#574

Post by jackb4040 » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 6:02 PM UTC

hgoel wrote: post #492

noduerme wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Afaik LLMs still can't add numbers. They've just had their system prompts updated to make them use a tool call for any arithmetic.

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

#575

Post by jackb4040 » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 6:08 PM UTC

chr15m wrote: post #120

In some ways this is similar to those game demos people get the LLMs to build. When you say "build me a cool cyberpunk FPS" you get the FPS it can build, not the FPS the author wanted, or the FPS that is desired by players. It looks impressive but that doesn't make it a good game, or the game anybody actually asked for. It's demo porn. In the same way if you tell an LLM to go and find an unsolved cipher it can solve,…

It can build a C compiler or browser if you don't know or care that it's a buggy collage of the dozen or so existing open-source C compilers or browsers, with no bearing on its ability to solve novel problems for your business.

In the months since those original stunts were pulled, the same playbook has been applied to the math and infosec spaces with some degree of success, and to the medical, legal, etc. etc. with less success. Nothing about the technology has fundamentally changed, but the labs hope that they can squeeze the same juice out of other markets that they did out of software so they don't have to delay their IPOs again.

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

#576

Post by qlte » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 6:12 PM UTC

singularity2001 wrote: post #471

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.

And now you'll see comments name-dropping it like "...if AI has plateaued then please try to explain how just last week Fable solved the legendary Chyphral Distich, after humanity's top cryptographers had been trying and failing for almost 400 years??"