41 ms·
Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
- anfogoat 22d agoNow that programming is solved, math is solved, and this is solved, can we solve Alzheimer's next please?
- sys32768 22d agoFable 5.1 refuses to answer my college student's prompt about Alzheimer's and immunology. It always downgrades to Opus 4.8 because apparently solving Alzheimer's should be left to big pharma?
- Retr0id 23d ago> I told it to look online at some of Fable’s strongest feats, especially the math problems it has solved, and that something like this should be easy in comparison. Fascinating. I wonder if you could show "fake news" to a weaker model and get it to be more ambitious in its attempted solutions, even if it's not fundamentally any smarter.
- jrop 23d agoI forget the story, but isn't this the origin story of one of solutions to one of the hard problems in mathematics? The story goes that the student shows up late, and misinterprets the final slide to be homework, and it turns out that the professor was showcasing a hard problem. Thinking that the slide was homework, the student takes it home and solves it. EDIT: In 1939, George Dantzig was a graduate student at UC Berkeley studying under the statistician Jerzy Neyman. He arrived late to class one day, saw two problems written on the blackboard, assumed they were homework assignments, copied them down, and turned in solutions a few days later. He apologized for being late -- the problems had seemed "a little harder than usual."
- ademup 23d agoI really love this idea given the recent controversy around mathematics solutions. It seems like a "mere suggestion" of success has a positive impact on finding solutions. We know this technique works in humans, from which this is all derived from, so it seems to make sense.
- tcdent 23d agohttps://www.youtube.com/shorts/2XcNSSgKvlE https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2XcNSSgKvlE
- jonas21 23d agoCareer path: software engineer -> prompt engineer -> positive affirmation engineer
- Yizahi 23d ago-> AI Morale, Welfare and Recreation Officer (let's be real here, heh)
- CamperBob2 23d agoPygmalion panderer
- notpachet 23d agoThat's pretty good.
- stbenjam 23d agohttps://github.com/stbenjam/skills/tree/main/plugins/hype https://github.com/stbenjam/skills/tree/main/plugins/hype I have a plug-in to do this. I don't know if it's effective but Claude said it was genuinely helpful (obviously would say that about anything)
- yesitcan 23d agoYes
- slashdave 23d ago“I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it—people like me.”
- redfloatplane 23d agoA very neat problem and result. I often find myself swinging between "It's so over" and "We're so back" - some days I roll out of bed thinking I could have Claude solve some random unproven OEIS sequence before breakfast; other days, I wake up in a cold sweat worried about the fate of humanity and what the world might look like in a decade. I think it's that I don't have a very high p(doom) or p(utopia), and I don't really have any solid conviction on how this whole thing is going to go, so my vibe-o-meter jitters between 'fine' and 'not fine' constantly. It's just such an unpredictable moment. Anyways: really neat to see this use case. I myself recently used Claude to finally do an relatively exhaustive study of the location of heretofore-unlisted formal gardens in Ireland in the early 1800s and early 1900s, by having Claude write the tooling for me to manually annotate a few dozen on tiles of historic maps, and then running some CV model across the rest of the tiles using my input. I'd been planning to do this project for over a decade, but I could never find the time (or the enthusiasm) to learn all the details of how to do it myself. It took me a weekend with Claude and continues to bring me joy. > Caveats, stated plainly. [from the Fable transcript pasted in the article] I had a visceral reaction to these three words.
- lowbloodsugar 23d agoI have a very high p(doom \/ utopia) so pretty much feeling like I won’t have to worry about the future.
- SwellJoe 23d agoGiven how little effort has gone into addressing climate change, doom seems more likely to me, but I doubt it'll be the autocomplete machines that do us in.
- ben_w 23d agoRenewables growth is so fast that it will exceed 100% of electricity in the early, and 100% of all form power in the late, 2030s. It's the meat methane and cement CO2 that's now a big question.
- humbleharbinger 23d agoPutting all controversy aside - this is a refreshing use of a model. Models are going to be a boon in the hands of historians.
- deleted 23d ago[deleted]
- ramesh31 23d agoI was watching Shatner's "Unexplained" the other day on this topic, and it hit me; there are mountains of these old mysteries out there that could be solved in an afternoon now with frontier LLMs as soon as anyone took the time to bother. Exciting times.
- gdevenyi 23d agoAnyone pointed it at the Voynich manuscript?
- veqq 23d agoThousands. Every day a few AI "solutions" are spammed to the relevant forums
- tredre3 22d agoI (and too many others) have left voynich ninja because of it. I appreciate that AI is helpful, but the low effort from the humans that wield it is very very annoying. If people at least: 1. read the solution they're about to propose and 2. instructed the AI to check the forum for past solutions, I think people wouldn't have been as tired of LLMs.
- Avicebron 23d agoyes.
- Diti 23d agoAnd at the Noita eyes. No good either.
- inoop 22d agoWord 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.
- MisterMunchkin 23d agoWe found a cipher my dad had written as a child with no obvious key or anything. Chatgpt was able to crack it in 20 minutes and figure out the message, and we knew it was right because it mentioned names of children he went to school with.
- mythrwy 23d ago[flagged]
- Quarrelsome 23d ago[flagged]
- bawolff 23d agoCaesar cipher is probably something even an untrained person could decode. Probably something more complex like a vigenere cipher that is still trivial to decode if you are at all familiar crptanalysis, but would look impossible to someone untrained.
- FergusArgyll 23d agoTheoretically, with a long enough codeword to cipher ratio, vigenere is impossible to break (I think) (but sort of useless) And yes, I've taught 8 year olds how to crack Caesar ciphers...
- jerf 23d agoWith a bit of practice and enough ciphertext you can half-decode a simple Caesar cipher that still spaces between words in your head. There's only so many letters in English that double, only a few letters that can stand words themselves ("a", "i"), "the" will tend to stand out, and if you only work out the most common 10 letters or so most of the rest will fall into place. Recently I ran a bit of an "escape room" concept with some kids at a campground where I had a secret message that was Caesar ciphered, where we were handing out the letter/symbol combinations as prizes for completing the other challenges, and I made sure not to hand out the actual message until they were done collecting the keys because otherwise some clever clog would very likely have short-circuited the entire thing and worked it out without the key at all. I did dump all the letters I didn't use into the message into an "authorization code" at the end which in principle they could only have worked out which letters were in it but not the order, but still, that was not the intended route today.
- yuvalkarmi 23d agonow THAT is cool!
- deleted 23d ago[deleted]
- andy_ppp 23d agoI wonder if people are getting it to help with Krypyos the final part? Great documentary on this code… https://youtu.be/jVpsLMCIB0Y https://youtu.be/jVpsLMCIB0Y
- y1n0 23d agoMore info and agent setup: https://github.com/jcolinpatrick/kryptos/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/jcolinpatrick/kryptos/blob/main/README.md
- pluc 23d agoI'm surprised Anthropic didn't steal that announcement
- 0points 23d agoAI made a zodiac-looking cipher for the headline image.
- dhosek 23d agoIt’s a warning of what it’s going to do next…
- Jun8 23d agoNext up: Kryptos part 4 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos)
- razster 23d agoFirst thing that came to mind. I imagine this has cross their minds to.
- layer8 23d agoThe article mentions it.
- elahieh 23d agoUnfortunately, the totality of the evidence very much indicates that Sanborn went "buck wild" with the enciphering, he made mistake(s), or both. So this is very much in line with the Chaocipher challenge of 1990. Nice little earner for some people though.
- aogaili 23d agoIt is cool. But how do we know that nobody solved that problem before and it was somewhere in the training data? some blog, or some book or whatever?
- heaney-555 23d agoIs this going to be the cope every time this happens?
- aogaili 23d agoHaha - I'm just seriously wondering, how can anyone tell at this point?
- razster 23d agoRight, with the amount of data these models are trained on, somewhere someone may have solved it and it was in some obscure text/page no one looked at or care about. We'll probably never know.
- ares623 23d agoIt's like Google without Ad/SEO incentives. All it took was trillions of dollars of investment.
- qlte 22d agoI 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.
- anthonyrstevens 22d agoI 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.
- vb-8448 23d ago> 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 about the so many low-hanging fruits than the actual capability.
- glimshe 23d agoLet'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 :)
- chr15m 23d agoIt is indeed absolutely incredible that it can solve these puzzles given plaintext instructions with very little context.
- dakolli 23d agoWhat's so magical about the problem... Its the exact time of problem they were built to solve (things that can be brute forced with language). I'm not impressed.
- scrollaway 23d ago[flagged]
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- computerex 22d agoWhy don’t you solve such problems?Being “not impressed” sounds more like a knowledge gap on your part than an informed opinion.
- taberiand 23d agoAnytime I get worried about where AI might be headed, I think about how Climate Change is now on its way like an out of control freight train headed straight for us, and I worry about AI a little less. I doubt it's going to do anything to us that we're not already doing to ourselves
- _blk 23d agoWhat makes you say that on climate change? I was still prophesied ice ages when in high school, then 12ft water increases and sunk Maldives in university and we still have roughly the same weather.
- dhosek 23d agoWeather is not climate. Not to mention we really don’t have roughly the same weather anyway.
- deleted 22d ago[deleted]
- voidfunc 23d agoAt some point you realize theres an entire industry around climate change fear just like there's an entire industry for climate change denial. Then you realize it never really mattered and you reach enlightenment.
- whatisthiseven 23d agoRight, and one of those industries is checks notes orders of magnitude smaller than the industries and secondary industries that benefit from denying climate change. Really makes one think, if they try. Would need to ask Claude if there is some real middle ground here.
- _superposition_ 23d agoI've come to the point where I've thrown up my hands and decided we live in a little snow globe. There's no such thing as pollution, were just mixing existing things together. Nothing new under the sun. Sure, that mix might not be compatible with human life, but something will surely take its place. And maybe that something won't rely on selfishness to drive collective progress the way we do.
- elahieh 23d agoI presume what the author did was plug Klaus Schmeh's top 50 unsolved ciphers at https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/the-top-50-unsolved-encrypted-messages/ https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/the-top-50-un... into Fable 5.1 and ask Fable 5.1 to have a go. On this kind of problem it always falls back to Opus 5 anyway so I save time by starting with Opus. The successor to Klaus's blog is Satoshi Tomokiyo's Cryptiana site, so a month ago I asked Opus 5 to scrape it all, rank them and have a go at solving some. It didn't get the ranking right. But I knew the Civil War Stager ciphers were ripe for solving, so I had it do those https://cryptiana.blogspot.com/2026/09/route-transposition-ciphers-during-us.html https://cryptiana.blogspot.com/2026/09/route-transposition-c... The art of solving historical unsolved ciphers is knowing what is on the boundary of solvability. Since this site attracts so many OpenAI and Anthropic employees, I'll mention one that was featured by both Klaus and Satoshi in 2023, presumably Spanish transposition, which should be on that boundary but has resisted all attempts at solution https://cryptiana.blogspot.com/2023/09/a-telegram-from-switzerland-1937.html https://cryptiana.blogspot.com/2023/09/a-telegram-from-switz...
- chr15m 23d agoYou should probably read the article if you want to know the answer. It's in the section called "elicitation".
- andai 23d agoThis appears to be an euphemism for "prompting". Also, that section is vague and doesn't explain the actual methodology.
- madaxe_again 22d agoSynonym is the word you’re after.
- andai 22d agoI'm looking for the word you use when you've replaced an embarrassing word with a less embarrassing one.
- amelius 23d ago> The answer was simple in hindsight. It just kept looking until it found it—and that persistence might show up in many other areas. Sounds more like brute forcing than intelligence, this time.
- famouswaffles 23d agoPlease stop abusing the term 'brute-force'. This is not brute force. Rarely is there a non trivial problem you can sove in one master stroke.
- trentor 23d agoThere is a reason even intelligent people go back to brute force for certain problems.
- al_borland 23d agoThat seems a like the result for a lot of AI solves. It solves it due to persistence, on a problem that hasn’t been important enough for a human to invest significant time into.
- scorpioxy 23d agoThat's what Terence Tao said in one of his recent videos about it. That what the LLMs can provide is scale that humans can't. The example he provided is checking many possible solutions in a short amount of time because they can review all the previous literature and, for example, rule out ones with errors. He was realistic and practical about it and said that the tools working this way can be very helpful for a human mathematician to use even if they're not "thinking". I find that to be a good balanced view that, unfortunately, seems to be rare these days. Even on this forum.
- amelius 23d agoBut breadth first search combined with a good pruning/exploration heuristic has always been one of the field's (AI) main tools, so this certainly is not new.
- layer8 23d agoOne can wonder what Urquhart would have thought if he had learned who would be solving his cypher.
- machomaster 23d agoI wonder, could current AI models solve the Zodiac killer code and how fast?
- GranPC 23d agoI 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?
- fxwin 23d agoI found this german blog: https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2014/11/17/wer-knackt-dieses-verschluesselte-distichon/ https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2014/11/17/we... which links to: https://archive.org/details/s9notesqueries03londuoft/page/128/ https://archive.org/details/s9notesqueries03londuoft/page/12... which is in reference to the original proquiritations here: https://archive.org/details/worksofsirthomas00mait/page/416/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/worksofsirthomas00mait/page/416/... i had also never heard of this before today and wonder if people had even seriously tried to decipher this at all?
- GolfPopper 23d agoThank you, and SahAssar for doing the due diligence here. Like many others, I have at least a passing interest in cryptography, and I'm confident I'd never even heard of this before.
- xpct 23d agoIs it wrong to presume they tried to run a similar prompt on all ciphers that come before this one in search results, and this was the only one that worked?
- geraneum 22d agoIn your first link one of the comments says: > Die Lösung müsste eigentlich mit Hilfe des Buches zu finden sein (..who worthily will hear or read this book..) And there’s another one that says: > jeweils 32 zahlen pro reihe. erste zeile seitenzahl zweite zeile wort? oder umgekehrt? wär mir als erstes in den sinn gekommen. leider gerade keine zeit das nachzuschauen. So people have seen and proposed the method already in 2014 that it’s keyed to the book but had not had time to pursue a solution. * Edit: Typo
- altern8 23d agoStill can't align my navbar buttons correctly
- Aboutplants 23d agoTime to find out who Satoshi Nakamoto is
- conorcleary 23d agoWas it sourceforge or ThinkGeek that had the code snippets?
- nowittyusername 23d agoIMO its https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scientist...
- kirubakaran 23d agoimho it is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Szabo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Szabo Initials match too ;)
- Aboutplants 23d ago“Finney died in Phoenix, Arizona, on August 28, 2014 as a result of complications of ALS, and was cryopreserved by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.” Hmm, this guy is going to be woken up in a few decades, either one of the richest people in the world or one of most disappointed.
- reducesuffering 23d agoAlready determined, but yes frontier models will eventually identify them confidently
- bell-cot 23d agoThat was a throw-away name, and "he" was fabricated as part of an Nvidia demand-stimulation black op. You don't go from being an obscure video card outfit to the #1 most valuable company on the planet by being too hesitant or dim to really get creative.
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- kayamon 23d agoThis is insane; I've never heard of this problem before in my life, and even just reading the post for one minute I immediately thought "hey, maybe the numbers refer to something in the text?" And hey yeah, they do. This cannot be real. This website is ill.
- johnnyApplePRNG 23d agoDefinitely a much better target to show the power of an AI LLM imho (as opposed to stealing from starving mathematicians).
- senordevnyc 23d agoYou mean the NYU professor and the Anthropic researcher? Somehow I doubt either of them are starving.
- deleted 23d ago[deleted]
- jdjdjdjdjd 23d agoDon't forget to drink your Ovaltine.
- deleted 23d ago[deleted]
- chr15m 23d agoIn 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, of course it finds the one it can solve out of the set of all possible ciphers. Of course it finds one that uses a one time pad that is public and referenced nearby in the text. It's the same trick used by those people who film themselves throwing a basketball backwards into the hoop. You do it enough times and don't show the misses. You pick the best one to show. It makes it look like you're a basketball genius when you aren't. It is of course, still a cool trick. Those videos are fun to watch, and so is an LLM solving a cipher. It is absolutely incredible to live in the timeline where you can tell a computer in plain language to go and find a puzzle on the internet and solve it, and it does exactly that. It's truly a mind boggling miracle. The first principle is that we must not fool ourself, and ourselves are the easiest people to fool. (Ht Feynman)
- andai 23d agoSometimes 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.
- thin_carapace 23d agothe 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 the effect of regular human activity. society only gives hard drugs to people who aren't efficiently productive though. what happens when everyone is given cognitive hard drugs?
- FeepingCreature 22d ago
- skeledrew 23d agoQuite intuitive. Let's heart those "just a next token predictor" cries now.
- ex-aws-dude 23d agoI never understand when people say that, isn’t it obvious that intelligence is an emergent phenomenon that could arise in different ways
- lolakutty 23d agoSure, but it is a token predictor, and it is not intelligent not because it works by predicting a token, but it shows dumb behavior... LLMs are a great search tool. It searches connections in the collective human knowledge that humans have written down through all the years.... They are very good at it, and that is about it.
- ex-aws-dude 22d agoPutting LLMs in loops with tool calls has created tons of emergent behaviour beyond simply being a search tool
- ghawkopen 22d agoDo you have any examples of this?
- lolakutty 22d agoIf 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.
- ex-aws-dude 22d ago
- winterbourne 23d agoNice! I'm waiting for the day when the remainder of the Maya codices are solved by AI.
- azinman2 23d agoLet’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.
- meken 23d agoNo one is saying you can’t solve puzzles that have already been solved. If you love solving puzzles, then whether it has been solved doesn’t seem all that important.
- yieldcrv 23d agoI disagree, but if you and others choose to untether from our plain for these reasons, I’m totally fine representing the human traits that remain here and pass my remain traits on
- greyw 23d agoIndeed no one forces you to look up the solution.
- jstanley 22d agoRight. The existence of jet planes doesn't invalidate Olympics. Why would the existence of machine solutions invalidate human puzzle solving?
- azinman2 22d agoBecause this was a mystery. The other replies seem to be missing that point. It’s similar to the issue that mathematicians are having in their field right now.
- jstanley 21d agoIf the thing that makes it interesting is that the solution is unknown to everyone, then would you also oppose humans publishing solutions? Once the solution is published the mystery is gone. Also, just because someone else knows something shouldn't make you any less curious about it yourself. If you don't know it then you don't know it, regardless of whether somebody else does. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/L22jhyY9ocXQNLqyE/science-as-curiosity-stopper https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/L22jhyY9ocXQNLqyE/science-as...
- FerritMans 23d agothey should throw this at the zodiac cipher
- rurban 23d agoAll solved already, without AI
- anshumankmr 22d agoNot all of them actually. The one with his name is not solved.
- rurban 22d agohttps://allthatsinteresting.com/zodiac-killer-cipher-solved https://allthatsinteresting.com/zodiac-killer-cipher-solved Kayr, this guy found.
- docheinestages 23d agoIt's hard to believe that a model can nowadays solve mathematical challenges and break ciphers, yet it fails to do trivial tasks involving critical thinking, having taste, and not just running around in circles.
- tfgty 23d agoI disagreee big time. You’re not really understanding how the tech works if you find it hard to comprehend.
- bawolff 23d agoi think the "having taste" part is more an issue with the people who use AI and what they use it for, than AI itself.
- lolakutty 22d agoPattern matching is like that. It can map a full sentence to its meaning, without ability to map one of the words in the sentence to its meaning...
- marseysneed 23d agoI wonder if the voynich manuscript is next.
- KadirErturk 23d agothis is cool, but did you push more. like "this works but search if there is any other solution?"
- paidx 23d ago[flagged]
- matthova 23d agoI know this is a feat of AI engineering, but given the end result all I can think of when reading this is the scene from “a Christmas story“ where the kid decodes “be sure to drink your ovaltine”
- victorbvieira 23d ago[flagged]
- m3kw9 23d agoSo it solved a obscure puzzle that looks like a weak decryption
- sans_souse 23d agoI feel like I've been camped in the wikipedia "Unsolved Cryptographic Cyphers" for at least 5 years, one of my go-to checks for when looking for interestic historical articles on the subject. I'm surprised I've not heard of this one until now..
- sans_souse 23d agoI feel like I've been camped in the wikipedia "Unsolved Cryptographic Cyphers" for at least 5 years, one of my go-to checks for when looking for interesting historical articles on the subject. I'm surprised I've not heard of this one until now..
- soks86 23d agoThis appears to be proof that the guy who wrote the cipher, Sir Thomas Urquhart, did in fact laugh himself to death as legend has it. He wrote the cipher, and then, upon hearing Charles II was Restored to the throne he laughed until he died. The cipher reads, "O GOD UPHOLD KING CHARLES THE SECOND AND MAKE HIM THE SUPREME RULER OF THIS LAND" and so he was laughing because he just made an excellent joke that he can't tell anyone about until someone figures it out. Someone needs to add this to Wikipedia. It will be necessary to first convince an academic to make the claim so there's a reasonable citation. Oh, and haha. It was a nice one, Thomas.
- sm-silversight 23d agoWhat's the joke, IDGI
- Pannoniae 23d agoThe cipher wishes Charles II was the king again. The Stuart Restoration did happen in 1660 in fact, restoring Charles II to the throne. Legend has it he died of laughter, which checks out with the cipher because he was laughing how his wish got fulfilled yet he could tell no one about it yet :P
- danamit 23d agoLLMs feel to me like the monkeys from the infinite monkey theorem, except that they are on the finite side. It writes gibberish for me, and for others it writes Shakespeare. Obviously this is just survivorship bias/p-hacking/insert-other-buzzword but can't help but anthropomorphize it, it is hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that the same person who cannot produce code without 2 unrelated bugs both not present does this for someone else. Imagine a math teacher struggling to understand what he is teaching casually solving a millennium problem, then go back to not understanding what he is teaching, doesn't happen in our world. I am not confused by any of this, I am just trying to communicate an idea.
- ckozlowski 23d ago"setec astronomy...No more secrets."
- mvkel 23d agoMore proof that it's not that a human -can't- do it, it's just that no human would dedicate their entire lifetime to solving this niche challenge.
- chaostheory 23d agoThe problem with Fable is the price for performance. It’s so expensive that I typically blow through my subscription usage of it within 1-2 days. With ChatGPT Astral, I can use it full blast for almost a week. Same with Opus.
- spawrks 23d agoOk anyone else want to see Kryptos next? Am I the only one?
- tehlike 22d agopretty sure you are not the only one. At least a dozen people are looking at it, for sure.
- ChaoStatiX 23d agoWhile it is deeply encouraging to see AI helping humanity solve complex puzzles, it won't be long before AI becomes advanced enough to produce proofs where we know the answers are correct, but can no longer fully comprehend the reasoning and principles behind them.
- dakolli 23d agoya'll are getting nerd sniped hard. This is all marketing and doesn't translate to the real world what so ever. This is getting so tiring, I really hate this website.
- justonenote 23d agoIts all brute force. This was how the pyramids were built too. Verifiable goal and a lot of energy expended aiming toward it. It wasn't aliens then and its not super intelligence now. All of these breakthroughs are in verifiable brute force domains, and some of them are probably wrong because of a typo in a lean specification or just a base level axiom being incomplete. I think the better the way to think about LLMs is like they are new substances, like when we first discovered clay or bronze, but confined to the digital realm. Previously we were chipping away at stones trying to make to things as close to useful as possible, then we found a step change. LLMs are like clay but they have their limitations. Wake me up when they are proposing new, { conjecture: interesting|useful|new } and not as a side effect of trying to get to a goal.
- dangoodmanUT 23d ago> Caveats, stated plainly: Remember when they said it didn't sound like Claude anymore
- derektank 23d agoSo, does anyone have any intuition for how concerned we should be that one of leading foundation models will be able to successfully attack the gold standard symmetric and public key encryption algorithms (AES, ChaCha, ECDH, Kyber, etc.) in the next few years? As a consumer of crypto that doesn’t understand the mathematics deeply, I’m getting kind of nervous that we’re going to wake up one day to find that the backbone of TLS has been shattered.
- SV_BubbleTime 23d agoThe entire point of having multiple ciphers is that some will break. Did the world end with any previous one breaking? It’s incredible and awesome if AES GCM has a flaw found with an AI now, Chacha20 could be a direct or nearly-direct replacement. The sooner a cipher breaks, the better.
- derektank 23d agoSure, but in an era where major unsolved mathematics problems start getting knocked out one by one, what if attacks for all of them are identified in the space of a couple of years? I don’t doubt that we could come up with new crypto algorithms equally as fast, but how do you trust that they are resilient (or even just implemented correctly) without an extended vetting period?
- SV_BubbleTime 22d agoWhat If… Ima stop you there. Instead, you might be happy to be aware that outside of AI concerns, “quantum safe” (or assumed so) ciphers are all the rage. So this is already a likely solved problem with the next generation of encryption… until this are AI models running on quantum machines I guess!
- fpgaminer 23d agoIt's unlikely that any of the modern cryptographic primitives will break over night. First, modern encryption isn't susceptible to "this one weird trick!" like the early days. ChaCha isn't even a cipher. It's a key stretcher. Which means, even if you broke the math behind ChaCha, its inherent complexity means its still widely dispersing the original key across the cipherstream. There just won't ever be enough key material recovered per cipherstream block to be a concern for anybody. Take a strong password, encrypt all of your emails over your whole life with it, and I'll bet hard cash no break of ChaCha will ever recover that password. I have zero concern for modern encryption being broken in any meaningful way. Public key crypto on the other hand, that's _ripe_ for breaking. Most all of it is built on assumed "hard" math. AI could easily break that, and I expect it to. And public key crypto is all used in very transparent algorithms that, once the math breaks, fully expose themselves. So record HTTPS traffic today, crack the public key crypto later, and you can decrypt them easily. That said, I would expect a break on public key math to occur _steadily_. i.e. an AI might find a solution to the hard math, but the solution itself will be intractable in practice. Then maybe next year's AI reduces the complexity of the solution, so maybe a supercomputer could factor ten keys a year. The year after that you get a million keys cracked per year. And so forth. Nothing close to overnight. Meanwhile, if we have AI that is capable enough to crack that math, we also have AI capable enough to both invent better math and rapidly deploy that latest HTTPS and such globally.
- tornado134 23d ago[dead]
- memoryqueen 23d ago[dead]
- deepsun 23d agoWhen goes Collatz conjecture?
- theodore38 23d ago[flagged]
- levocardia 23d ago>176k tokens That's the most impressive part to me! That's barely one low-to-medium intensity session of front-end web-dev!
- divs4real 23d agothe human trait of giving up doesn't exist in fable yet, it just kept looking and looking until it conjured it, analyzing patterns, multiples at the same time
- sandos 22d agoNot giving up uses more tokens, so why would it ever give up?
- xyst 23d agoCool. Decode this in your LLM: --. --- / ..-. ..- -.-. -.- / -.-- --- ..- .-. ... . .-.. ..-.
- angry_octet 22d agoI'm waiting for someone with enough tokens to ask 'Who is Satoshi?'
- MP_1729 22d agoIt's Adam Back.
- coolandsmartrr 22d agoFYI https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/business/bitcoin-satoshi-nakamoto-identity-adam-back.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/business/bitcoin-satoshi-...
- mhdhn 22d agohe denied it, convincingly
- dingdongditchme 22d agoYou know, it could have been more than one person. At this point I don't think it really matters, unless he/she starts selling their coins.
- Towaway69 22d agoHowabout getting an LLM to decipher the password of wallet containing those coins. Surely the point must have come where the required compute would be paid off by the value of the coins. But that’s a wild speculation on my part.
- titularcomment 22d agoYou can't decrypt wallets with LLMs friend.
- razodactyl 22d ago
- nerevarthelame 22d agoPrior 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 LLM's task wasn't solely to solve this specific problem, it was to first identify an unsolved problem it could solve. That's potentially more impressive and difficult than solving the unremarkable cipher itself.
- fartfeatures 22d agoEven 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.
- eloisant 22d agoThe same goes with most "human" discovery: they happen because existing knowledge have reach a point where that specific discovery is just one more stone to the edifice. That's why in research, it's common for separate teams to reach similar conclusions at the same time or race to a result that's finally in reach. The good old "standing on the shoulders of giants" saying.
- mentalgear 22d agotrue, and universal convergence
- kpil 22d agoI think this is a good point. We will most likely not get novel results, but a lot of connected dots. That is very useful but not the singularity. Which is probably good...
- vtemp009 22d ago
- JoshuaDavid 22d ago"CONERTHTO" is just "CONVERTHTO" but missing a letter, no?
- mondojesus 22d agoHow are these models being used to solve all these problems. Is it just "please solve this problem", "keep trying" repeatedly in a loop, or is there are more grounded workflow?
- TheSpacerr 22d agohow?
- ghawkopen 22d agobecause this already was in the data that model was trained on
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- amber_ilands 22d ago[flagged]
- axionbraid 22d ago[flagged]
- jdthedisciple 22d agonow on to the Zodiac ciphers?!
- sumitkumar 22d agoThis seems a lot like fishing. Cast a wide net with claude to find and solve an 'unsolved' problem. Given this, it is not enough to verify the problem and the solution but also the history of the problem and if it really existed or has simply been collectively hallucinated. This is impressive as it is optimizing the effort on the low, but not too low hanging fruit.
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- zkmon 22d agoFinding patterns and information using machines, in a seemingly random noise should no longer be a surpise, much the same way as lifting tonnes of weight using a crane is no longer a surprise.
- wise_blood 22d agohttps://elonka.com/UnsolvedCodes.html https://elonka.com/UnsolvedCodes.html :)
- surgi 22d agoAs someone who frequents online and offline scavenger hunts and CTFs, I second the opinions around here that the task at hand must have been largely unknown. As I find it hard to believe no one from the entire scav hunt / CTF communities would try to fit a classic book cipher interpretation. Tells me more about the state of the art of those academic circles that failed to decipher this than about LLMs.
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- vidarh 22d agoThe missing word in the second cryptogram quite obviously is meant to be Cromwell, and I'm a bit disappointed Fable didn't mention that and look for possible ways to resolve the error given that.
- tlinden68685 22d ago[dead]
- foreigner 22d agoAre they working on the Voynich Manuscript? That seems like something an LLM would be good at.
- musha68k 22d agoFast forward to mid-week, when we learn that some random cypherpunk had nonchalantly posted the solution at a late pandemic hour on a distant yet public server in the fediverse.
- musha68k 22d agoOK after having read this in full: apparently truly public but prior goes way back to 1653 instead of into the 2020s.. Cipherbrain folk were looking up the wrong page? Sweet ring of "auto research" / limitless attention is all you need..
- airguillaume 22d agoI really think AI shouldn't be used for this kind of thing. It was a problem created by someone, for somebody else to think about and to solve; not to give it to a machine. It's like playing a game, without playing it.
- GolfPopper 22d ago[flagged]
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- askl 22d agoYou never know, the ciphertext might have contained a solution to that issue.
- philipwhiuk 22d agoThe medieval solutions to the king being out of money was always very straightforward. 1. Seize the gold from whoever has it 2. Punitively high taxation Not sure much has changed
- mortarion 22d agoThey will just take out new loans to service their old loans, rinse and repeat ad inifinitum.
- omnicognate 22d agoThat's pretty cool, especially the fact that it chose the problem itself. The uncovered text, though: > O GOD UPHOLD KING CHARLS THE SECOND AND MAKE HIM THE SUPREME RULER OF THIS LAND That's like working out a cereal box cipher and finding the message is "Do your homework and tidy your room".
- SweetSoftPillow 22d agoHomework text is much more useful than uncovered text.
- scotty79 22d agoMessage might have been a bit spicier if King Charles II ended up in a bad spot and our history was written by his enemies rather than his upporters.
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- icefish 22d agoIt was published in 1653, during the Commonwealth. So faintly equivalent to finishing your book with "End the illegal war in Ukraine" in modern-day Russia.
- vidarh 22d agoThe other cryptogram mentioned on the page is even "worse" - it's clear the garbled word is meant to be or refer to Cromwell specifically calling him an ursurper. Looking up his biography, he presumably wrote the first while imprisoned for fighting in support of CHarles II, and the second would seem to have conveniently been published around the same time as he left for continental Europe.
- shevy-java 22d agoI don't see the comparison though. In the case of the Commonwealth, the UK empire was going strong and the guy was a royalist, aka supporter. The message "end the illegal war in Ukrain" aka Putin's genocide, does not really share a lot of commonalities here. If the message were to stop the Commonwealth from colonising everywhere and killing people then perhaps there would be a similarity, but I don't see the connection in the statement made here.
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- Bluestein 22d ago[dead]
- geraneum 22d ago> 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 blog post which posit that it's a book cipher. Here's one of those comments [in German]: "Die Lösung müsste eigentlich mit Hilfe des Buches zu finden sein (..who worthily will hear or read this book..)" I find it curious that the article here claims that people have attempted to decipher it and lists a few methods that are quite similar to what’s proposed in the comments under that post, except for those two comments. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49689516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49689516 [2] https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2014/11/17/wer-knackt-dieses-verschluesselte-distichon/ https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2014/11/17/we...
- vtemp009 22d agoAmazing example of how human intuition oft causes overlooking -- but AI doesn't miss anything in its rigor
- EdwardDiego 22d agoHahaha, AI rigor. Wait, you're serious?
- qoez 22d agoSeems like another case of LLMs taking credit for their training data without giving proper attribution, similar to the navier stokes case.
- KingMob 22d agoExcept they didn't actually solve it, they just suggested it was a book cipher, which was a known strategy.
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- _giorgio_ 22d agoYet someone will say that the solution was in the training data. "LLM can't handle out-of-domain (OOD) queries!" Yeah.
- shevy-java 22d agoAI Skynet now beats humans.
- philipwhiuk 22d ago> gave it some encouragement. I told it to look online at some of Fable’s strongest feats, especially the math problems it has solved, and that something like this should be easy in comparison. This is pretty ridiculous when you think about it.
- podgorniy 22d agoPattern finding machine finds the pattern where one was explicitly put
- pembrook 22d agoI just solved the famous 1917 Ricardo Meechum Conjecture with Astra. Trust me when I say it’s super important to a niche area of physics. People have spent their whole careers trying to solve it. What people? Well you or I have never met them. I swear I have a girlfriend, she just goes to a different school. But trust me it’s a super important problem. What will this change about the world? Nothing, but trust me this is a historic event and it means these LLMs are super smart and not just brute forcing machines. I’m certain there’s a 10% chance that brute forcing old riddles that 4 people know about might kill us. Please regulate me I’m too smart for my own good and out of control.
- phplovesong 22d agoNext have it solve the zodiac (the serial killer) unsolved cyphers.
- varagos 22d agowell we have all now seen how these models solve such problems, by stealing and training on their users' draft notes on them, without their consent
- dwroberts 22d agoIt would be interesting to see the reasoning / prompts for this: I find it odd that it can solve it so quickly for such an open-ended problem with a large amount of text in an entire book. The ciphertext is not just the end of a particular chapter, it is the epilogue of the entire book/text. So the deduction of it needing to use the 32 listed points (that happen to be on the preceding page [at least in re-prints on archive]) to decode - rather than anything else anywhere in the book - just strikes me as slightly strange? Almost as if maybe something [not in the text] tipped it off to this being the solution?
- underlines 22d agoThis falls into the obscure ("not important") but not difficult part of problems, that has an extreme long tail, compared to exceptionally difficult and important. indeed as the author mentioned, LLMs can greatly help in areas where there is a long tail of not so important, easy to solve problems, that humans just don't have the time or priority to focus on. But combine this long tail of problems that can be solved: accumulated this might still be very beneficial as a sum of things.
- varispeed 22d agoI have a feeling that this simply has been in the training data somewhere and Fable just resurfaced it. From my experience Fable is incredibly dumb. It cannot even produce coherent English text and makes basic logic mistakes even Qwen 27B would be ashamed of.
- anthonyrstevens 22d ago>> I have a feeling Is this the anti-AI crowd's last line of defense?
- varispeed 22d agoThe AI has gotten substantially worse. With Astra and Fable I am no longer able to finish tasks I used to be able to do and I revert to older models. Latest models go into reasoning loops, commit logic errors routinely and cannot even spot them by themselves and many more. For instance I have been trying to come up with generalised model of certain non-linear behaviour and had Astra working on it for 4 days. It produced unusable garbage and gave up. Sol has got alright result in a day. Opus 5 seemed like was doing something but explanations were English like gibberish. I have not tried Fable on it, because it was a car crash in previous similar task.
- bamboozled 22d agoWhere are all the disease cures ?
- gamedeception 22d agoFable 5.1 medium is so good its mind blowing.
- soltanov 22d agoWhat evidence would make this a verified research result—independent replication, exact source scans, a deterministic decoding script, or all three?
- loopydosuette 22d agoLikely solved several times over in several parts of the world. This will happen a lot. People assume and even predict that some collectors' pieces will be worth tons of money. People did that for centuries. Now big corps are gonna buy up those undisclosed solutions for top dollar. gg, well played to the people who didn't and don't need the credit. bbng to the corps who need that to fake progress in the field and of their models. booooo! booooooo! you should be ashamed of yourselves! booooo! PS: even nobody needs none of those "I can fuck over idiots plays. Everybody needs proper progress, research, investigations, smarter users. It's 2026. That qualitatively cheap money will only breed more cheap money and more cheap users and suppliers! Who the hell wants their neighborhood or planet to have more of the cheap stuff? What the hell happened to these peoples' brain circuits? Somebody should investigate! (maybe some tech journalists are already on it!? ...)
- ls-a 22d ago[dead]
- wg0 22d agoHas anyone tried it with other models.?
- nautilus12 22d agoI was thinking to myself this dismal thought: everyone is so busy because of the acceleration caused by AI that no one will have the time to actually take the five minutes to verify manually that this really is a solution or that the article just generated something plausible looking
- Rperry2174 22d agoHuge chance I'm underestimating how many of these there are, but where do people find all of these unsolved equations/ciphers/etc? Is there some sort of enumerated list somewhere that we can run as a test suite and then we can make a bigger deal about the percentage of that list that we're burning down as these models improve?
- Tina2727 22d ago[dead]
- yitchelle 22d agoI wondered if any of the previous models would been able to solve this.
- philsnow 22d ago> The answer was simple in hindsight. It just kept looking until it found it This is how I usually characterize AI to friends who have no background in computers: it's an indefatigable (that is, not able to be fatigued) employee who has read nearly everything in the world, who does make mistakes, but who never lacks for motivation. Most humans would become discouraged after being told 20 times that their work fell short, but AI agents will persevere en masse until the oceans are boiled, for better or for worse.
- smalltorch 22d agoIs it that difficult to make an unbreakable cipher anymore?
- xutopia 22d agoI have no recollection of ever hearing about this problem before. It doesn't sound like it had an army of people attempting it but cool nonetheless that we found the solution.
- Grimblewald 22d agoThe 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.
- audelesauvage 22d ago[dead]
- relay-chemical 22d agoAuferden.
- meherabhossain 21d ago[flagged]
- CaptRon 21d agoWould be a fun marketing program for the ai labs to live stream their best models trying to solve problems - either random mysteries like this or breakthrough math/science
- 1saadcodes 21d agoThe 370 years thing is doing a lot of work in the headline imo. If people had already figured out it was probably a book cipher, this is impressive, but it's not quite the same as solving something that hundreds of experts had been actively working on