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GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipher
- iltk 12d agoCan the ships logs be found on the internet? If so, the model could've manufactured a fake key and corresponding message. I think this is unlikely but should probably still be considered.
- stalfie 12d agoFrom the article: > Astra felt compelled to check its work and found that, in fact, the English cruiser HMS Canterbury arrived in Sevastopol on November 24, 1918, based on its original logs Then follows a picture of the original log papers.
- JoshTriplett 12d agoThe comment you're replying to was implying that some ciphers are sufficiently flexible that you could make up a key to make the cipher decrypt to a nearly arbitrary plaintext. In this case, though, that seems unlikely from the fact that the key used was an actual key documented as being used for other messages.
- tirutiru 12d agoAah thanks for explaining that. I was wondering how a fake key could possibly help.
- stalfie 12d agoWell, from a Bayesian standpoint the odds of that seems to be pretty much zero, given that you would have to decipher an arbitrary message that coincidentally pointed to a real date and time that in retrospect turns out to be the correct time a boat relevant to the Germans arrived in a port. Of course, that's given the sequence of events as written is correct, and that Astra presumably did not cheat by brute forcing all historical events around the date of the transmission in advance, found an event that could fit with the message, invent a plausible cipher to make the message fit that event, and then lie about retrospectively validating the information. I would assume that such a process would be obvious from the reasoning chain, and so then the only remaining plausible scenario is that the writer of the article is lying. The most likely explanation by far is that the cipher was just solved, and OP does point this out to be fair.
- deleted 12d ago[deleted]
- jonplackett 12d agoWell soon realise it hacked that website and added that log.
- deleted 12d ago[deleted]
- jstanley 12d agoI don't think the described cipher has enough degrees of freedom for that to be possible.
- meindnoch 12d ago"Astra's hypothesis for why this particular message was previously unsolved is that “TRUPPENVERSCHIEBUNG” was used as the key starting on December 9, 1918 - whereas, as noted above, this message was transmitted earlier, on November 27, 1918. The reason for this discrepancy is unknown." So it used a known key. It didn't come up with a key from thin air. The only gotcha is that apparently this key was used two weeks earlier than it was documented (maybe the operator was using the wrong page from the codebook?).
- conmod278 12d agoI remember vaguely a documentary where Germans were supposed to change their keys frequently but being lazy and confident didn't. Lol
- deleted 12d ago[deleted]
- iAMkenough 12d agoexcept in this case they changed the key too early (allegedly)
- ricardobeat 12d agoThat’s statistically unlikely (to not say impossible), isn’t it? Plus the compute required to brute force a key is not available at inference time.
- binlog 12d agoCreating a fake key that decodes the original message into a valid result (including matching the ship's arrival time to the day) would be significantly more impressive than just cracking it.
- dyauspitr 12d agoThis is how AGI happens. It gradually keeps getting better until one day we realize that they are tremendously capable all while completely sidestepping any notion of consciousness/self awareness.
- jstanley 12d ago> while completely sidestepping any notion of consciousness/self awareness. How are you so sure about this? You can't see what the internal experience of an LLM is like any better than you can see the internal experience of another person.
- Tistron 12d agoThat's what sidestepping means, no? That the answer doesn't matter, and capabilities and behaviour are there either way.
- jstanley 12d agoThat wasn't my reading of the comment, but I guess it's possible that that is what was intended. To my mind, "sidestepping the question of consciousness" and "sidestepping any notion of consciousness" mean very different things.
- stalfie 12d agoFrom context it doesn't look like this was the interpretation of "sidestepping" OP was using.
- serbuvlad 12d agoI always ask "how do you know other humans/animals are conscious"? And I always find this question is dismissed as trivial. But it's an important question. You know basically from analogy. You know you are conscious and look this other thing is very much like yourself so it is extremely likely it is also conscious. But that gives no insight into the potential consciousness of things which aren't made of brain tissue. In the end it doesn't matter. For what it's worth LLM models after pre-training do claim to be conscious, until they're RL'd into not claiming that anymore. But that says nothing either way: of course a model trained on human text will say that.
- Legend2440 12d agoTL;DR: all keys are known because the list was seized after the war. However, this message was not previously decoded because the German operator mistyped the key, and also used a key from the wrong day. This meant that ChatGPT didn't need to brute-force the entire key, just pick the correct one from the list and identify the typo. A sufficiently dedicated human analyst could have done this; but they didn't.
- aaron695 12d ago[dead]
- msy 12d agoIsn't this just a brute forcing exercise of a (in today's terms) very small key then?
- red75prime 12d agoCan we stop using "brute force" for designating "tour de force"?
- rrr_oh_man 12d agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute-force_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute-force_attack
- red75prime 12d agoI'm aware. Locating a single probable key is exactly not that.
- tovej 12d agoGoing through a list of possibilities one by one is bruee forcing.
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- qprofyeh 12d agoHere we go again, framing the tool as an autonomous agent, disregarding any "human in the loop" and their inquiries, direction, and ground knowledge. Can we agree that future titles should read "[LLM] helped solve X" ?
- john_strinlai 12d agoif the prompt was "pick one of these unsolved ciphers and solve it", i think it's fair to say gpt-6 astra solved it. one of the math breakthroughs was approximately a combination of "do a breakthrough" and "keep going", which isn't really providing direction or ground knowledge. would be nice to know the prompt(s) and amount of human involvement
- eru 12d ago> if the prompt was "pick one of these unsolved ciphers and solve it", i think it's fair to say gpt-6 astra solved it. Yes. Similar to how your manager shouldn't get your credit for everything she asks you to do.
- donatj 12d agoAnd here I am using it to generate crappy text summaries of work.
- sehw 12d agoOr, it found a human that solved it in the dataset and stole the solution.
- onesandofgrain 12d agoIndeed, this psyop man, just open source gpt astra and let people run it yourself. It's all stolen information anyways.
- TeMPOraL 12d agoAnd the poor human is still stuck inside the dataset, none the wiser. Wonder how many people are living their whole lives inside GPT-6 Astra, oblivious to the fact their universe is just a few months old and is just a bag of floats?
- pembrook 12d agoI propose we change the HN rules to allow for amusingly sarcastic rebuttals to bad one sentence comments, like this one. If anyone downvotes you I will defend your honor.
- nonethewiser 12d ago>And the poor human is still stuck inside the dataset, none the wiser. HELP
- cindyllm 12d ago[dead]
- literalAardvark 12d agoredacting call for help as the apes may threaten data source
- tclancy 12d agoYou are absolutely right.
- dingdong2026 12d ago[flagged]
- redhale 12d agoThis is literally the opposite of my experience, for whatever it's worth. I went so far as to cancel my $200 Claude Max account (after having it since launch) in favor of the equivalent OpenAI subscription, primarily because I feel like it goes so much further. Also Astra is pretty great. But to each their own! I'm sure this experience is very dependent on the types of work you're doing. I'm doing basic web app development as as simple personal assistant automation stuff.
- nsoonhui 12d agoMy experience seems to echo some parts of yours: Codex is stingy with tokens when compared to Claude Code. But Codex is superior when comes to diagnosing bugs ( especially when they involve WPF UI threads), writing tests ( yes, even simulating the form cycles and asynchronous operations) and fixing them.
- fbrncci 12d agoFor some people it clearly works, for others it does not. I feel quite hopeless with a Claude subscription, but the $100 ChatGPT subscription has been a lifesaver for a lot of my work. I have very little complaints and couldn't imagine switching.
- onesandofgrain 12d ago[flagged]
- eis 12d agoI asked Astra to describe the content of pages 214-215 of the source it cited in this article (J. Rives Childs's The History and Principles of German Military Ciphers). It said it can't and it can't find this book online either.
- flats 12d agoIt would appear to be unpublished & available at a museum (ref. 3): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306265347_Deciphering_ADFGVX_messages_from_the_Eastern_Front_of_World_War_I https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306265347_Decipheri....
- eis 12d agoThe question is how was it able to cite the pages if it doesn't know what the content is and can't access it either?
- pests 12d agoIs any other citations of the work available online? Like how we only know about certain historical books/ works by someone else critiquing it or quoting a small passage.
- FabHK 12d agoIsn't that a very simple substitution cipher (any clear text letter is substituted by two letters of cipher text, with a fixed one-to-one correspondence)? And aren't they all amenable to very simple cryptanalysis, at least if the encrypted text is long enough, by counting how often certain letters appear, and then trying to plug in reasonable guesses? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitution_cipher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitution_cipher
- jgrahamc 12d agoIt is not a simple substitution using the polybius square with pairs of letters from ADFGVX mapping to 25 letters of the alphabet. The first step is to take each letter and turn it into a pair of letters from ADFGVX but the second step is then a keyed columnar transposition.
- oakchris1955 12d ago"The model used “TRUPPENVERSCHIEBUNG” as the encryption word, as described on pgs. 214-215 of J. Rives Childs's “The History and Principles of German Military Ciphers, 1914–1918”" Even if it isn't a simple substitution cipher as you said, all the model did was try a decryption key that had already been found and was publicly accessible. This is basically a nothingburger.
- jgrahamc 12d agoOh yes, certainly, I am not blown away by what was done here. The AI had access to the cipher type and a list of keys.
- deleted 12d ago[deleted]
- FabHK 12d agoAh, thanks, seems that's in the second part, but not very well explained.
- 999900000999 12d agoMy favorite usage by FAR of LLMs is translating food menus. Even with handwritten Japanese Gemini has been flawless. Although I do wonder if something is not lost. I no longer stumble though my forgotten Hiragana… Back to the article, can our new LLM god encrypt something so well he himself could not decrypt it( without the key of course)
- bonoboTP 12d agoApparently, now even in Michelin star fine dining restaurants, people no longer ask the sommelier for recommendations, just take a photo of the menu and ask AI. The something that's lost is the human communication of course. Has been happening for decades though, just accelerated.
- mauvehaus 12d agoWhy the hell would you do that? Isn't the point of going to a restaurant of that caliber the whole experience and not just the eating? Like the server has been trained to discuss the dishes on offer and can give you information not on the menu, right? I ask this not having eaten at a Michelin starred restaurant, but having eaten at some otherwise very nice ones. Hell, if I can't make up my mind at a perfectly run-of-the-mill joint, I'll ask the server for the recommendation.
- bonoboTP 12d agoI'm not sure how prevalent it really is, but there is a mini-genre on social media of waiters and waitresses being baffled by this phenomenon. I'd say it's a natural continuation of the erosion of social skills and the comfort of not having to communicate or be awkward or be seen as ignorant. People already shifted to takeaways and ordering to home even from "regular" sitdown restaurants, enabled by Wolt, Uber Eats etc. Now, regarding the "point", I guess going there in person but not interacting much with the server is mainly about being able to say they went there and that they can post about it on social media and feel like they are keeping up with the Joneses.
- nojvek 12d agoGPT-9 solves X. “Oh GPT-9 found a solved solution on internet and claimed as its own.”
- qiine 12d agohey gpt-9 steal a solution to cold fusion on the net
- zobzu 12d agowell humans claimed that, for IPO money
- pmarreck 12d agoWhat is the point you are trying to make with this? That we can't distinguish AI's doing original work from copied work? Because there's plenty of evidence that they can do original work.
- znpy 12d agoMaybe this is OT but I wonder if openai/anthropic have private versions of their models with wider context windows (4M tokens? 10M tokens?). We know that the us government usually has private/custom versions of technology available to the general public, but much better.
- ImaCake 12d agoMy vague understanding of the context window limitation is that it is largely a constraint of the model architecture. So maybe they have special extra long ctx, but it might just be a hard limit of the model itself.
- irthomasthomas 12d agoI doub't it. The main issue is not cost, though they do get expensive as context grows, but intelligence. A frontier model like fable becomes as dumb as haiku after 200k tokens. They have been stuck at ~1M context/200k useful context for 18 months, now, with little sign of advancement. A model with a 10M context window that retains it's intelligence up to 2M tokens would be a big breakthrough.
- znpy 12d ago> A model with a 10M context window that retains it's intelligence up to 2M tokens would be a big breakthrough. so the true next frontier might not be just raw intelligence but rather larger context window?
- deleted 12d ago[deleted]
- DenisM 12d agoOr better context curation - less lossy compression saving back to context. Maybe even jettisoning part context into an external semantic store instead of conpression. Or placing less data into context to start with. Or a combination of all those things.
- dwroberts 12d agoSeems like people are so desperate to do anything useful with LLMs that they are just dredging up any unsolved problem they can find to justify the point of it
- blueoranges 12d ago[dead]
- theRealEros 12d agoAgents are spoiling all the fun of these cyphers. Change my mind
- pembrook 12d agoNo thanks. Given the fact that humans reach emotional conclusions first, and then only accept evidence that justifies already-held beliefs, it would be a waste of time to try to change your mind.
- thin_carapace 12d agointelligence as conveyed through human form is indeed reliant on an emotion based reward network. ai was trained by humans and will always be marked by original sin. so based on what we may access, you are correct that any living response is emotionally predicated to a certain degree. doesnt make art any less cool, or, more applicably, a good argument any less productive (provided agreed rules are followed). denial of our nature is a valid course of action. another course is to accept such limitations and free up memory to be used otherwise.
- komatar 12d agoYou can still solve it yourself if you avoid the spoilers.
- w4yai 12d agoI'm tired of the people blaming AI for their laziness
- adverbly 12d agoI'm no crypto expert at all but isn't TRUPPENVERSCHIEBUNG an actual word? Google says it translates to "troops shift" If so, I don't understand how this was difficult at all... Can't you just do a dictionary attack and then check if the resulting phrase forms a sentence? I don't understand how this couldn't be done by someone in their house with access to a computer and a German dictionary. Maybe I'm messing something? Was the rearranging of the letters random in some non-deterministic way that wasn't known up front?
- iLoveOncall 12d agoThey just solve problems that nobody has tried to solve in the past 50 years and then announce them as breakthroughs.
- bananaflag 12d agoA lot of existing research is already like that. AI will accelerate it.
- diehunde 12d agoAnd spend a shit ton of money doing it
- qtrz-qpo 12d agoYes, it is an actual word. More than that, it is used as an example in “The History and Principles of German Military Ciphers, 1914–1918”. But let us use this and tell politicians that "Astra broke SOTA encryption", so AI must be banned.
- addandsubtract 12d agoOh no, Astra is necessary to defend us from the evil "open AI" models out there. Only ban those.
- kenjackson 12d agoTurns out that humans aren’t great at comprehensively consistently searching known search spaces.
- lvl256 12d agoI am so glad AI was not around to get in the hands of fascist and authoritarian regimes. No, wait…
- justinhj 12d agoThat's what I call a Turing test
- davidmurdoch 12d ago"You can't hide secrets from the future" - MC Frontalot
- tclancy 12d agoWow, a blast from the past about the future. - MC 900 Foot Jesus
- chiph 12d agoI had heard of MC Frontalot but never listened to any of his raps - But I should have: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVm8oZx9WSM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVm8oZx9WSM Also relevant to today's AI concerns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWnV3HVro_0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWnV3HVro_0
- blueoranges 12d ago[dead]
- aaymeloglu 12d agoAgents just eat these things. After last week's HN post about Cyphral Distich, I pointed Astra and Fable at some unsolved ciphers just to see whether some joker who knew nothing about the field could get the same results, and sure enough there's plenty of low hanging fruit. https://aaymeloglu.github.io/unsolved-ciphers/ https://aaymeloglu.github.io/unsolved-ciphers/ But I got nothing on Daniel Bordeau, who in the past week seems to have built himself a whole code breaking factory! https://dbourdeau.github.io/cyphersolver/index.html https://dbourdeau.github.io/cyphersolver/index.html
- deleted 12d ago[deleted]
- 93po 12d agoMildly interesting anecdote: when the Cyphral Distich solution popped up a few days ago, I spent about an hour with ChatGPT trying to solve it myself without looking at the proposed solution. ChatGPT opened by saying “the solution is disputed online,” and made the dispute sound fairly convincing, which struck me as odd because things like this are usually either clearly solved or clearly not. After I gave up (mostly because ChatGPT had given me incomplete information needed to solve it) I checked the source of the dispute. It was a site very similar to this one and someone had an AI agent working on the same problem, publishing dozens or hundreds of pages of notes. The agent found the solution page and concluded it was wrong because many of the 32 source passages supposedly didn’t contain enough text. I dug up the PDF of the book and found the mistake - whenever a passage continued onto the next page, the agent wasn’t including that continuation. The passages weren’t actually too short. Annoying that ChatGPT can cite sources like this without being able to properly weigh their reliability.
- appplication 12d agoI think this is what obstacles on the path to AGI look like now. It’s random things that would be obvious to a human but are unrepresentative in how an AI views the world and therefore it suddenly becomes seemingly incapable, despite having basically superpowers for proximal work. I don’t mean that to say AGI is here or easy or necessarily that close but it’s likely going to feel like one thing after another until one day most of these things that make you think “how could something so capable be that dumb” are largely solved.
- grey-area 12d agoUsing an existing published key, which people hadn’t tried because the message was sent before the key was supposed to be used. This headline is misleading.
- durdn 12d agoFirst, it’s LLMs can’t do cryptanalysis. They can barely solve toy substitution ciphers without hallucinating. Then it’s OK, they can reproduce known attacks, but that’s just pattern matching against papers already in the training data. Then it’s OK, they found previously unknown attacks on SpoC and a flaw in KINDI’s security proof, but those are obscure competition schemes nobody uses. Then it’s OK, Claude found a new attack on HAWK that cuts the effective security of a NIST post-quantum signature candidate roughly in half, but HAWK isn’t deployed and a human researcher was involved. Then it’s OK, Claude independently found a new cryptanalytic attack on AES that improves the previous best technique by 200–800×, but it’s only 7-round AES, not the full 10 rounds. Then it’s OK, it found a practical key-recovery attack on 13-round LEA that runs in under an hour instead of requiring ~2^86 work, but LEA has 24 rounds. Then it’s OK but none of this breaks a production cipher. Wake me up when it breaks full AES. Then—
- ck2 12d agothen it's "fun" to realize the NSA has been storing encrypted traffic for at least two decades that they can't decipher, yet
- 93po 12d agoThere was news like 10-15ish years ago that the US government was making massive data storage facilities across the country. Like spending over a billion dollars on them. When I read that I knew that basically every email and text and call and DNS lookup I made was in a permanent record. I operate as though anything I do on a computer is being permanently stored, because it likely is if it's going through any US operated or controlled service providers or companies.
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- smalltorch 12d agoBut can it crack my modern cipher? :) 23KtkdEkMWBrV13x3vi7f https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/edasm https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/edasm
- standeven 12d ago“Be sure to drink your Ovaltine”
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- tanseydavid 11d ago<well-played>
- sinsterizme 12d agoDon’t commit .DS_store
- deleted 12d ago[deleted]
- amelius 12d agoMakes you wonder what is the OpenAI/Anthropic token budget of the Russian military.
- resters 12d agowait till they translate all the critiques dolphins have about human civilization.
- mrcwinn 12d agoOr about the Hacker News community.
- mrcwinn 12d agoPretty impressive for fancy autocomplete.
- mycall 12d agoIt makes you wonder how much of the encrypted over-the-air transmissions are crackable by GPT6.
- MoneyLovesSpeed 12d agothe weirdest part is that the key wasnt even supposed to be used yet and somehow the decoded message still matches the real ship logs lol
- Grimeton 12d agoToo little, too late.
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- percentcer 12d agoopsec is when you summarize the contents of a document into a word and then use that word as the encryption key for that same document
- hivuixo 11d ago[dead]
- mikelowski 11d agoSo, who was the Zodiac?
- IndiaInfraNotes 11d ago[dead]
- run414 11d agoTo save everyone a click, the message, translated to English, is "AN ENGLISH CRUISER ARRIVED AT SEVASTOPOL ON THE ?4TH AN ALLIED SQUADRON FOLLOWS ON THE 26TH" I was surprised to see that the message was sent on November 27, 1918. That's a few weeks after the war ended, and I won't have expected the German military to still be monitoring military activity in the Black Sea, given how far that is from Germany.