4 ms·
TL;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 k
by Legend2440 16d ago
TL;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 16d ago[dead]
- msy 16d agoIsn't this just a brute forcing exercise of a (in today's terms) very small key then?
- red75prime 16d agoCan we stop using "brute force" for designating "tour de force"?
- rrr_oh_man 16d agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute-force_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute-force_attack
- red75prime 16d agoI'm aware. Locating a single probable key is exactly not that.
- tovej 16d agoGoing through a list of possibilities one by one is bruee forcing.
- stalfie 16d agoI think it is legitimate to argue that the process here does not fit the usual definition of "brute forcing". Traditionally, brute forcing would refer to something like a dictionary attack, where an algorithm tries to match all possible combinations of words to eg. find a password. Here, the approach was more common sense based, using historical records and possible error sources to narrow down the possibility space enormously in advance, try out a much more limited set of options within that space until you got a result that made sense, and finally validate those results using historical records. It's the exact same kind of "brute forcing" a human expert would do.
- 0x457 15d agoWhy? Because dictionary here is smaller than your idea of dictionary for brute force?
- red75prime 15d agoBecause it wasn't an expert or a heuristic developed by an expert that made it possible to decrease the dictionary size.
- red75prime 16d agoIf the final set of possibilities is astronomically smaller than a naive one, calling the whole process a "brute force exercise" draws attention to an astronomically insignificant part.
- rrr_oh_man 16d agoThat’s a fair point.
- xeromal 16d agoIt's doing something that wasn't worth the squeeze for a human. Seems like a perfect use case for AI. Sure, I can do X or I can do Y but if it takes me a few weeks but AI can hash it out in hours, it now makes it worth it.
- j-pb 16d agoWe've moved the goalpost for AI often enough that even being as capable as "a sufficiently dedicated human analyst" is not considered noteworthy.
- rplnt 16d agoIt obviously is? See above. Or do you not feel the clarification is important? AI being able to solve things no human bothered to try is great, but it is very different from AI solving things humans tried to solve and failed. And the latter is what pops to mind seeing these titles.
- YeGoblynQueenne 16d agoWait a minute. We've had AI that is as capable as a human and even more so since the 1950's. I keep banging on that drum but the first AI system to prove mathematical theorems was Logic Theorist by Alan Newell and Herbert Simon, presented at the Dartmouth conference that named the field of AI in 1956. Wikipedia says: Logic Theorist proved 38 of the first 52 theorems in chapter two of [Alfred North] Whitehead and Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica, and found a new and shorter proof for Theorem 2.85.[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_Theorist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_Theorist The first system to outperform human experts in medical diagnosis was MYCIN, an Expert System from the early 1970's at Stanford. Wikipedia again: An evaluation of MYCIN was conducted at the Stanford Medical School. The first phase of the evaluation consisted of 10 test cases of diverse origin, chosen by a physician who was not acquainted with MYCIN's methods or knowledge base. These cases were presented to 7 physicians and 1 senior medical student. 10 prescriptions were compiled for each of the cases, 1 recommended by MYCIN, 1 prescribed by the treating physician at the county hospital, and 8 by the aforementioned individuals. The second phase of the evaluation consisted of eight infectious disease specialists being provided the clinical summary and set of 10 prescriptions for each of the 10 cases and tasked to provide their own recommendations for each case and assess the 10 prescriptions. MYCIN received an acceptability rating of 65%, which was comparable to the 42.5% to 62.5% rating of five faculty members.[9] This study is often cited as showing the potential for disagreement about therapeutic decisions, even among experts, when there is no "gold standard" for correct treatment.[citation needed] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin#Results https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin#Results And then of course there's the long history of human-dominating AI players for traditional board games starting with DeepBlue's win against GM Gary Kasparov in 1996. Again: we've had that sort of AI for a long, long time now. It would be great if any claim of "moving goalposts" has better be very well informed about the history of AI and its accomplishments, as well as its failures, first.
- roenxi 16d ago> A sufficiently dedicated human analyst could have done this; but they didn't. Isn't that something of a given? If possible then a sufficiently dedicated human analyst could have done it. If impossible, ChatGPT couldn't have done it. Everything an AI ever has or will do is presumably going to be within reach of a sufficiently dedicated human analyst or a large enough team of them. The only real learning here is another example of a task that would have required intelligence up until an AI does it, then we suddenly discover that analysts don't do anything requiring general intelligence.
- j_maffe 16d agoI'm not sure I agree. More is different. Being able to execute logic at a higher scale and speed would make some previously infeasible intelligence tasks possible, resulting in a new level of intelligence.
- gnfargbl 16d agoMost contemporary stories around AI include the implication that AI did something humans couldn't. This is because the big players have been shilling AGI hard for a while, and their valuations depend on maintaining the sentiment that serious progress in that direction is being made.
- egeozcan 16d agoIs there anything that LLMs (or any software for that matter) could imaginably and theoretically do but do humans qualitatively cannot do? I don't really know what I'm talking about but I imagined the difference was always quantitative (in a nutshell: they need less time).
- Closi 16d agoOr almost any invention for that matter. Washing machines can’t do anything humans do, they just remove labour. Trucks don’t do anything longboats can’t, it just need less labour and time/effort to build roads rather than canals. Computers can’t calculate anything humans can’t dry run by hand etc. Everything in reality is about reducing time/effort/material/cost or achieving more with less resource.
- YeGoblynQueenne 16d agoI'm sorry, where does it say the German operator mistyped the key? The article says indeed that the message remained unsolved because it was sent on the wrong date, but I can't see the bit about the mistyping anywhere.
- Almondsetat 16d agoIs the ?4th a date?
- jannes 16d agoThere is no typo in the key, just a typo in the encrypted message: S4STEN The S should probably be a 2 instead.