4 ms·

> Various people attempted to decipher it, but it seems they were missing one crucial hint. They tried methods like frequency analysis, substitution, and homoph

> 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 20d ago
Amazing example of how human intuition oft causes overlooking -- but AI doesn't miss anything in its rigor
- EdwardDiego 20d ago
  Hahaha, AI rigor. Wait, you're serious?
qoez 20d ago
Seems like another case of LLMs taking credit for their training data without giving proper attribution, similar to the navier stokes case.
- KingMob 20d ago
  Except they didn't actually solve it, they just suggested it was a book cipher, which was a known strategy.
  - geraneum 20d ago
    Apparently neither found it worth pursuing, and just phoned it in. > “…leider gerade keine zeit das nachzuschauen.“
  - Traster 20d ago
    Yes, imagine it's a book cipher and then you hand it to a tool which famously has had every book in existence cleaved apart and fed into it.
    - vidarh 20d ago
      The number of permutations you can try to decode a book cipher is near infinite. Just "a book cipher" does not tell you how the numbers map to words or characters in each book. You just try creating random book ciphers and see whether an LLM would solve them without hints.
  - Closi 20d ago
    And it's not like it was a load of detail either, it's a comment on a blog 16 years ago. You don't get points for throwing out a possibility for the type of cipher, you get points for solving it.
- onesandofgrain 20d ago
  Agreed, pr and nothing more. Just more stealing from big corps
- ueueh 20d ago
  Yup. Listen there’s no doubt LLM’s are powerful. BUT THEY RELY ON HUMAN INPUTS. It’s getting tiresome seeing the same bull shit over and over. The labs have invested hundreds of billions and now need to show RSI. It’s not happening and won’t happen. Without continual new information supplied by humans the models would freeze.
  - xnickb 20d ago
    The question for me is where it leaves innovation. Have we really peaked as a species that we so easily want to give up on the young and hand them over a tool that would substitute reasoning? Call me naive or old, but I don't see a need to think critically when you have a tool that can outmatch you in that. I tried drawing analogies with Chess, but it doesn't work. Shall I ask AI to do that for me?
    - dvfjsdhgfv 20d ago
      > The question for me is where it leaves innovation. Have we really peaked as a species that we so easily want to give up on the young and hand them over a tool that would substitute reasoning? This is a crucial question but I'm afraid the ship has sailed. We should focus on how to prevent atrophy and cultivate our skills in spite of LLMs. For me and many others this means doing thins the old way with occasional assistance from LLMs that actually increase our understanding. Occassional because if you do it often, you get intellectual atrophy because you stop even trying.
      - xnickb 20d ago
        This is all valid and I am with you here. However I can totally imagine kids in 10 years viewing writing code by hand same as we view making fire using flint and steel: yes can be useful, but why bother? Except in this case I fear we're losing something very important as opposed to the above example.
        jackeee1 20d ago
        [dead]
- vovavili 20d ago
  I would argue that elaborating on scattered bits and pieces found here and there throughout the Internet is enormously valuable. Fair attribution is the tricky part.
- Culonavirus 20d ago
  EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.
- semiquaver 20d ago
  The goalposts will continue moving until morale improves.
elif 20d ago
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.
- vintermann 20d ago
  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. I don't think this is all that demonstrative of AI power, more than what we already know from coding prowess. It is, however, a great counterexample to the often heard assertion that short cryptograms can't be decisively solved because they have too many possible solutions.
  - elif 20d ago
    "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.
- onesandofgrain 20d ago
  [flagged]
- slekker 20d ago
  Weak argument, with an absurd analogy trying to make your point.
stellamariesays 20d ago
[flagged]
krisoft 20d ago
> 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. With hindsight both appear to be incorrect, thus they missed the hint. > It appears that is not true. Strong words. I don't think your comment supports them. Let's look at each part of the quote you claim is not true. "Various people attempted to decipher it". Your link support this, doesn't go against it. "but it seems they were missing one crucial hint." the link you provide doesn't show anyone getting the right hint. Yes they were groping in the right direction, but they didn't get that the "32 Proquiritations" is the key itself. "They tried methods like frequency analysis, substitution, and homophonic substitution, and none of these approaches worked." I don't know if people tried these methods. The sentence doesn't claim these are the only method people tried. That would be obviously unsupportable. So as long as there is someone for each of these methods who tried them the sentence is true. "That’s because they missed one easy clue." It is obviously impossible to prove that everyone missed this clue. Maybe someone during all those years got the hint, solved the riddle, chuckled and never wrote about his experience. Perfectly possible and we won't ever know. What is certainty that the people on the link you provided misses the hint. But you also haven't shown that those people "got the clue". So which part do you feel is "not true"? Because they each seems to be holding up.
- pixl97 20d ago
  >"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.
  - mikepurvis 20d ago
    Will file that away as well, seems like it could be useful in various professional contexts.
sigmar 20d ago
>lists a few methods that are quite similar to what’s proposed in the comments under that post, except for those two comments. Is today the first time you've heard of a book cipher? Those blog comments didn't provide much progress.
kenjackson 20d ago
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 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-printing.html https://vera-wren.github.io/posts/2026-09-11-the-key-is-a-pr...
- speedstyle 20d ago
  'Best' is putting it strongly for an autonomous claudish summary of an autonomous claudish rebuttal to a claudish write-up of the finding
  - kenjackson 20d ago
    Best is a relative statement of quality. And in this case reflects the lack of alternatives more than anything else. But if there are better please let me know.
Gregkion 20d ago
Does that really matter? We and a LLM are doing the same thing: trying things out while skipping unrealistic/wrong things. If an LLM can do the same thing as we do but a lot faster, t already won and this is just another example.

vtemp009 20d ago

Amazing example of how human intuition oft causes overlooking -- but AI doesn't miss anything in its rigor

EdwardDiego 20d ago
Hahaha, AI rigor. Wait, you're serious?

qoez 20d ago

Seems like another case of LLMs taking credit for their training data without giving proper attribution, similar to the navier stokes case.

KingMob 20d ago
Except they didn't actually solve it, they just suggested it was a book cipher, which was a known strategy.
- geraneum 20d ago
  Apparently neither found it worth pursuing, and just phoned it in. > “…leider gerade keine zeit das nachzuschauen.“
- Traster 20d ago
  Yes, imagine it's a book cipher and then you hand it to a tool which famously has had every book in existence cleaved apart and fed into it.
  - vidarh 20d ago
    The number of permutations you can try to decode a book cipher is near infinite. Just "a book cipher" does not tell you how the numbers map to words or characters in each book. You just try creating random book ciphers and see whether an LLM would solve them without hints.
- Closi 20d ago
  And it's not like it was a load of detail either, it's a comment on a blog 16 years ago. You don't get points for throwing out a possibility for the type of cipher, you get points for solving it.
onesandofgrain 20d ago
Agreed, pr and nothing more. Just more stealing from big corps
ueueh 20d ago
Yup. Listen there’s no doubt LLM’s are powerful. BUT THEY RELY ON HUMAN INPUTS. It’s getting tiresome seeing the same bull shit over and over. The labs have invested hundreds of billions and now need to show RSI. It’s not happening and won’t happen. Without continual new information supplied by humans the models would freeze.
- xnickb 20d ago
  The question for me is where it leaves innovation. Have we really peaked as a species that we so easily want to give up on the young and hand them over a tool that would substitute reasoning? Call me naive or old, but I don't see a need to think critically when you have a tool that can outmatch you in that. I tried drawing analogies with Chess, but it doesn't work. Shall I ask AI to do that for me?
  - dvfjsdhgfv 20d ago
    > The question for me is where it leaves innovation. Have we really peaked as a species that we so easily want to give up on the young and hand them over a tool that would substitute reasoning? This is a crucial question but I'm afraid the ship has sailed. We should focus on how to prevent atrophy and cultivate our skills in spite of LLMs. For me and many others this means doing thins the old way with occasional assistance from LLMs that actually increase our understanding. Occassional because if you do it often, you get intellectual atrophy because you stop even trying.
    - xnickb 20d ago
      This is all valid and I am with you here. However I can totally imagine kids in 10 years viewing writing code by hand same as we view making fire using flint and steel: yes can be useful, but why bother? Except in this case I fear we're losing something very important as opposed to the above example.
      - jackeee1 20d ago
        [dead]
vovavili 20d ago
I would argue that elaborating on scattered bits and pieces found here and there throughout the Internet is enormously valuable. Fair attribution is the tricky part.
Culonavirus 20d ago
EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.
semiquaver 20d ago
The goalposts will continue moving until morale improves.

elif 20d ago

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.

vintermann 20d ago
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. I don't think this is all that demonstrative of AI power, more than what we already know from coding prowess. It is, however, a great counterexample to the often heard assertion that short cryptograms can't be decisively solved because they have too many possible solutions.
- elif 20d ago
  "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.
onesandofgrain 20d ago
[flagged]
slekker 20d ago
Weak argument, with an absurd analogy trying to make your point.

stellamariesays 20d ago

[flagged]

krisoft 20d ago

> 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. With hindsight both appear to be incorrect, thus they missed the hint. > It appears that is not true. Strong words. I don't think your comment supports them. Let's look at each part of the quote you claim is not true. "Various people attempted to decipher it". Your link support this, doesn't go against it. "but it seems they were missing one crucial hint." the link you provide doesn't show anyone getting the right hint. Yes they were groping in the right direction, but they didn't get that the "32 Proquiritations" is the key itself. "They tried methods like frequency analysis, substitution, and homophonic substitution, and none of these approaches worked." I don't know if people tried these methods. The sentence doesn't claim these are the only method people tried. That would be obviously unsupportable. So as long as there is someone for each of these methods who tried them the sentence is true. "That’s because they missed one easy clue." It is obviously impossible to prove that everyone missed this clue. Maybe someone during all those years got the hint, solved the riddle, chuckled and never wrote about his experience. Perfectly possible and we won't ever know. What is certainty that the people on the link you provided misses the hint. But you also haven't shown that those people "got the clue". So which part do you feel is "not true"? Because they each seems to be holding up.

pixl97 20d ago
>"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.
- mikepurvis 20d ago
  Will file that away as well, seems like it could be useful in various professional contexts.

sigmar 20d ago

>lists a few methods that are quite similar to what’s proposed in the comments under that post, except for those two comments. Is today the first time you've heard of a book cipher? Those blog comments didn't provide much progress.

kenjackson 20d ago

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 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-printing.html https://vera-wren.github.io/posts/2026-09-11-the-key-is-a-pr...

speedstyle 20d ago
'Best' is putting it strongly for an autonomous claudish summary of an autonomous claudish rebuttal to a claudish write-up of the finding
- kenjackson 20d ago
  Best is a relative statement of quality. And in this case reflects the lack of alternatives more than anything else. But if there are better please let me know.

Gregkion 20d ago

Does that really matter? We and a LLM are doing the same thing: trying things out while skipping unrealistic/wrong things. If an LLM can do the same thing as we do but a lot faster, t already won and this is just another example.