today at 2:13 PM
For anybody interested, the actual encrypted message:
BTTE UM ANGABE DES MARSQWEGES X BEFINDE MIQ IN X ROSENOW ROSENOW X SOFORT FUNKANTWORT X WASCHBBSCH
Please specify the route of march. I am in Rosenow, Rosenow. Immediate reply by radio. Waschbusch.today at 2:38 PM
I am in Rosenow, Rosenow.
After trying many different approaches, GPTâ6
Astra focused on using the repeated place name
ROSENOW ROSENOW as a crib.
(Is it possible that this is a misreported detail? It feels like a singular ROSENOW would be an equally effective crib)
today at 2:48 PM
This was explained in the article right there:
> it suspected that the plaintext of Nr. 173, SIPVX, might be related to the plaintext of the unbroken MVUEH message
It makes sense that Nr. 172 and Nr. 173 might be related since they were sent at around the same time.
In Nr. 173, "ROSENOW ROSENOW" was also present.
It also makes sense that a longer crib would generally be more effective than a shorter one.
today at 3:34 PM
It was partially explained by the article. It was not stated that ROSENOW was repeated in 173, and it was not obvious from the article text why ROSENOW would ever be repeated. Thus my curiosity.
A sibling commenter explained it - Rosenow is both a municipal name and a district name, so naturally it would be repeated. (Like "New York, New York")
It also makes sense that a longer crib
would generally be more effective than a
shorter one.
I'm a novice at crypto though, so, maybe I've got that totally wrong.
today at 5:20 PM
The reason a crib is useful is because the enigma can't route a letter back to itself. So, you can slide the crib along the message until no letters line up, and that's possibly where it is. If your crib is "the", that's not terribly useful, because it could exist anywhere. The longer the better.
I ONLY know this because https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsBZOcqZerk, btw.
today at 2:52 PM
Rosenow is a municipal (around 32kmÂČ) and in there is a district also called Rosenow. So the sender just specified his current position a bit more.
today at 2:56 PM
akin to "New York, New York" (as in NYC, NY)
today at 3:30 PM
Ah, thank you! That makes sense.
today at 7:00 PM
today at 2:48 PM
Maybe naive of me, but could it simply just be the overfitting of the same tokens being sent on the input twice because of repetition rather than some unknown implied intelligence.
today at 2:19 PM
Out of interest, what was the ciphertext?
Edit: Found it from here: https://mvueh-enigma-solved.carterl.chatgpt.site/
ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTCtoday at 2:29 PM
Do we have any kind of transcript as to how the message was cracked, and whether this was cheaper or more expensive than simply Bombe-style trying all the combinations?
today at 4:00 PM
As the article states, the LLM built code for both an enigma simulator and a bombe simulator.
Breaking enigma is often about using lucky or educated guesses to heuristically reject large chunks of keyspace to leave the remaining keyspace computationally tractable.
Note that the key (lol) complication with this message seems to be that it had a wheel rollover that most messages do not have to deal with, and that rollover drastically reduces how much you can reduce the potential keyspace using all the techniques noticed by the original crackers.
The wheel rollover I think just requires more brute force. Unfortunately, this might be an example of OpenAI the company having vastly more compute time and effort than your average enigma nerd. For example, modern compute clusters like supercomputers can tractably brute force enigma with no cleverness in like a day or less, while home computers would still take thousands of years to compute that. It's very scalable. Did astra have access to significant compute?
However, even considering that, the inferences made by the LLM are good, and picking this specific message to attack, precisely because it should be soluble but might have had an extra wheel rollover that made it more computationally intractable for hobbyists but not a large company is a clever thing to do for the LLM.
today at 4:30 PM
This was done by an OpenAI subscriber, not an employee, so Astra would not have had access to OpenAI's massive compute for brute forcing. The scripts it wrote presumably ran on the computer of the customer. (ChatGPT can run scripts on OpenAI's servers, but it has a 45 second execution limit.)
today at 4:30 PM
> Unfortunately, this might be an example of OpenAI the company having vastly more compute time and effort than your average enigma nerd.
I don't think this applies, isn't this just the researcher using ChatGPT Codex on their machine?
today at 2:14 PM
Why wasn't this in the article?
today at 5:51 PM
Interesting. Do we know the reason why those specific messages were sent with different keys? I would imagine that there were separate keys for special high-security messages or something like that, but the almost identical content and the way the key was changed here (first only part of the configuration, then suddenly everything) makes it look more like an error or a test.
today at 2:14 PM
That's crazy. Can someone share context of the message.
today at 2:19 PM
Slopped up site https://mvueh-enigma-solved.carterl.chatgpt.site/ seems to indicate it's due to:
The SS-Totenkopf Division was advancing east during the opening weeks of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. 10 July 1941, the division had just fought its way through the Soviet border defenses around Sebezh. It had moved through Lithuania and Latvia, crossed the Dvina area, and advanced through Dagda toward a place German records called "Rosenow." The division moved out of the Rosenow area around 6 July, fought around Sebezh on 8-9 July, and then continued east/northeast toward Opochka and eventually Porkhov.today at 2:20 PM
The place is Rosenau actually.
today at 2:24 PM
I believe Germans spell it achtually.
today at 2:38 PM
Your account will be flagged for using humor, we are only dealing here, with the very serious subject, of killing humanity with AI.
today at 3:26 PM
Even the "with AI" is superfluous here, given the subject matter.
today at 3:10 PM
Ich glaube, dass Deutsche buchstabieren es "aktuelle", eigentlich.
(apologies for my broken learner German, I decided not to use a translator).
today at 5:48 PM
Aktuell is a german word, but not for actually
Aktuell means current. Not sure if a exact german translation exist for that word. TatsÀchlich maybe
today at 5:59 PM
Yep, "actual" is Spanish for current, too. A false friend.
today at 7:15 PM
Attention! In German a falscher Freund, false friend, is also used as a standing medical term for Flatus deceptor.
today at 6:56 PM
Iâd say âeigentlichâ
today at 2:27 PM
was the misspellings deliberate?
today at 2:34 PM
i would assume yes, to throw off decyphering. even more impressive that they managed to crack it
today at 2:51 PM
Looks like Q is used as an abbreviation for CH
today at 5:50 PM
gemini 3.8 flash in anrigravitiy oneshoted the descryption in about 45min non-steered run (opus is still running with the task, has some script to run for about 100min)
Prompt
Decrypt encrypted with enigma `ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC`
Result
Raw Decryption (verbatim from the machine): BTTEUMANGABEDESMARSQWEGESXBEFINDEMIQINXROSENOWROSENOWXSOFORTFUNKANTWORTXWASCHBBSCH 2. Segmented German (with military telegraph conventions expanded): BTTE UM ANGABE DES MARSQWEGES . BEFINDE MIQ IN : ROSENOW ROSENOW . SOFORT FUNKANTWORT . WASCHBBSCH
(Standard German radio conventions: X represents punctuation/spacing; Q was frequently substituted for CH to prevent transmission ambiguities; BTTE was an enciphering operator typo for BITTE; WASCHBBSCH was an operator typo for the signature WASCHBUSCH).
3. Corrected German: âBitte um Angabe des Marschweges. Befinde mich in Rosenow, Rosenow. Sofort Funkantwort. Waschbusch.â
4. English Translation: "Please specify the route of march. I am in Rosenow, Rosenow. Immediate reply by radio. Waschbusch."
Cryptographic Verification Re-encrypting the plaintext using the identical key settings reproduces the exact ciphertext byte-for-byte:
Enigma ( M raw ) = ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC Enigma(M raw
)=ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC 19:10
today at 6:19 PM
How do you know it didn't just get the result from the web?
Putting "ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC" into google search returns the result from Gemini with similar explanation, which it references to a Yahoo article about the Astra breakthrough and that's a result as of 3 hours ago.
today at 7:02 PM
UPD out of curiosity I ran the same prompt against gemini 3.8 flash via api with and withouth internet search.
with search it found and referenced pages, including the hn ones. Without search it just described what one would need to descrypt (`To decrypt this ciphertext, the specific Enigma machine parameters are required:`) and the list.
Out of curiosity ran the same prompt against bunch of models - grok, kimi k3. They all say the same thing that they need model version, rotors and so on to descrypt.
When file output tool is enabled, some models give python script.
--
I read through some of the logs that antigravity gives. It produced intermediate results, scripts, calls, assumptions (about german language). I've shares random bits in comment below to give a taste of what it was doing.
--
The freshness of the news reduces changes that model fetched response from them
today at 5:57 PM
Wow. Was there any indication how it did that? Did it bruteforce the key and check which result looks sufficiently German, or was it just LLM magic like "decoding" base64 purely in the inference loop?
(Or did it look up the results on the web?)
today at 7:00 PM
TLDR: it created program to decypher the string using opensource solutions related to enigma
--
it searched for enigma-related repos and implementations, fetched various github repos parts, build inline descryption program.
It ran bunch of various scrips like:
clang++ -g -fsanitize=address /Users/dp/.gemini/antigravity/brain/e9a54e5f-1325-448a-8d43-fc537b901f34/scratch/enigma.cc -o /Users/dp/.gemini/antigravity/brain/e9a54e5f-1325-448a-8d43-fc537b901f34/scratch/enigma_dbg && echo "ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC" | /Users/dp/.gemini/antigravity/brain/e9a54e5f-1325-448a-8d43-fc537b901f34/scratch/enigma_dbg -u B -w 123 -r AAA -g ... -c -l /Users/dp/.gemini/antigravity/brain/e9a54e5f-1325-448a-8d43-fc537b901f34/scratch/english
and
sed -n '1060,1130p' /Users/dp/.gemini/antigravity/brain/e9a54e5f-1325-448a-8d43-fc537b901f34/scratch/enigma.cc
and
Running 82M combination scan for unsteckered Enigma across all rotors, reflectors, positions, and ring settings. Monitoring progress.
and
Scanning all 60 rotor permutations and reflectors B and C across all ring settings (step 2) and all 17,576 indicator positions. Monitoring progress.
--
I also have opus running. It produced some sypher cracker which is still running (estimated time 100min, is about 15 min left)
--
My point is that astra isn't special. This appears to be quite narrow, well-documented and explored task. The goal itself is approacheable by other LLMs and non-researches task.
today at 7:05 PM
> TLDR: it created program to decypher the string using opensource solutions related to enigma
It seems weird to me that a (relatively) straightforward workflow like that would elude crypto hobbyists for the last 21 years (since 2005 according to the article).
today at 7:24 PM
Most probably the framing "elude crypto hobbyists" is a not correct description of reality, rather a way to sell sesation.
I think they did not have access to all pleora of enigma-related bits and pieces. Or there were not enough autistic ones. Or this one was simply overlooked in favour of more interesting one.
The whole trick is possible only because bunch of people whote bunch of text and code about the subject, well-documented it and made public. For LLM all these bits and pieces are very "close" and easy to pull together unlike for people who have to deal with each bit and decision and information.
today at 7:00 PM
I am not an SME and I oneshotted this in just 60 seconds by Googleing it.
today at 7:03 PM
You won this time... :D
today at 5:55 PM
Neat, but "did it entirely on its own" is incongruous with "developing the necessary Python and C++ software for an Enigma simulator".
I'd start by asking how much of that generated software is novel, or easily found on the web? Then, how much of the breaking process was offloaded to that software? If Astra is just handing off tasks to another computer, then I'm not sure how much credit it deserves. Finally, it looks like Astra provided some useful insights which narrowed down the search. Were these insights cribbed from elsewhere?
today at 7:31 PM
>I'd start by asking how much of that generated software is novel, or easily found on the web? Then, how much of the breaking process was offloaded to that software? If Astra is just handing off tasks to another computer, then I'm not sure how much credit it deserves. Finally, it looks like Astra provided some useful insights which narrowed down the search. Were these insights cribbed from elsewhere?
Well were they? Short of you showing us the answer just sitting there or some tool that can already solve it I see no reason to believe this was the case. And the problem being out there unsolved for a long time implies it's not the case.
And that's taking your concern at face value. It just seems incredibly pedantic to say it didn't solve the problem by itself because it created it's own tools to help solve it. Beyond that we could also fault it for not creating the GPU's it's running on.
today at 7:35 PM
It's a given now that LLMs are leveraging code to do things.
"On it's own" generally means "not steered" or otherwise given professional guidance or input.
I would say "developed the necessary software for a simulator" to be even more impressive - "here solve this problem" and "OK, but first I have to built the entire lab!"
today at 5:58 PM
Why does any of this matter? Llm is a memory of knowledge, of course it got what it got based on prior work.
It can code enigma simulator from the algorithm. That's not really a problem. Astra will send computing to programs, LLMs are not good at computing themselves, why is this a big deal?
today at 6:56 PM
Would you give much credit to someone who ignored a nearby hammer and pounded in a nail with his fist?
today at 7:10 PM
I'd be impressed, followed by asking if they needed to go to the hospital.
today at 6:27 PM
I'll just note that building an enigma simulator and/or code cracker is a common course project and there are several tutorials on doing so.
today at 6:21 PM
today at 7:34 PM
We are crossing a threshold. The frontier labs told us these models are really good at cryptography. And people either didn't believe them and thought they were just after regulatory capture or downplayed the evidence. They are solving more and more novel problems and it's going to continue.
This is not to say the reaction to "mythos is too dangerous" is unfounded but it missed the most imporant and obvious signal. This technology is drastically changing the world.
today at 5:43 PM
Is it possible that the key is incorrect but still decoded to a valid message? I realise it's possible when you're using keys that are the same length as the message, but I don't know exactly how the Enigma machine works and if this was something that they would do or not.
today at 7:16 PM
I might be wrong but I was under the impression that these were one time pads and only cracked because of bad key hygiene when it came to generating them. If that's true, it's entirely possible
today at 7:22 PM
Enigma wasn't one time pad based (although these were used a lot during the war), enigma does have known weaknesses such as letters never being decrypted to itself. Enigma was based off daily settings (rotor positions, plugboard settings etc), which could be mostly recovered by the end of the war, unlike actual one time pads which are only crackable by bad key hygiene/brute force.
today at 6:02 PM
today at 2:32 PM
The correct title: Researcher brakes one specific stubborn historic enigma message with good help from Astra.
Stubborn for a long time because the message used a completely different key from the rest of that day's traffic. Everyone assumed it shared the daily key. The original transcription had errors. The left rotor turned over at letter 72, which is rare and breaks standard crib attacks.
What is cool, if true, is that it was a 2 day collab between the Leffer and Astra. To me this shows the importance of human in the loop, was still all also showing how immensely power of llm tools. But I think itâs getting a bit silly how much anrticles ignores the driving force (the person) in breakthroughs like this.
today at 2:55 PM
From TFA:
"However, the most astonishing thing about this break is that the GPTâ6 Astra did it entirely on its own."
today at 2:59 PM
Follow up bit adds more context:
"Carter Leffer only directed GPTâ6 Astra to see if it could break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page."
today at 5:04 PM
today at 2:59 PM
keep going
awesome! keep going
great work! keep going
today at 7:42 PM
Las Vegas Algorithm: A randomized, non-deterministic algorithm that is 100% accurate but has a variable runtime.
today at 3:15 PM
/goal See if you can break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page.
today at 4:11 PM
does /goal also have time/token limits?
today at 5:05 PM
Only when my usage runs out
today at 4:26 PM
Not as far as I can tell, when I've been using it.
today at 3:03 PM
> to me this shows the importance of human in the loop
today at 3:10 PM
today at 4:49 PM
Make me proud is current SOTA
today at 3:55 PM
Now we just need this as a service. Another LLM that would encourage your agent like a cheerleader and provide emotional support and reassurance if necessary
today at 2:37 PM
I agree with this. I think the researchers who's harnessing the llm's power should be credited more than the model itself. We also need to understand the thought process and the prompts that are given to the model so we can learn and collab to ensure humanity's progress as much as the llm itself.
today at 3:16 PM
> I think the researchers who's harnessing the llm's power should be credited more than the model itself.
Even when the report literally says the LLM did it on its own?
Let's not over-correct in the direction of knowing better than the first party.
today at 3:32 PM
> the report literally says the LLM did it on its own
Not mention it also says this...
> We are still analysing the GPTâ6 Astra logs to see exactly how it executed the break.
today at 3:49 PM
today at 4:45 PM
âknowing what problems are worth solving â- pricelessâ.
For everything else, thereâs Astracard
today at 5:27 PM
It also decided which problem to solve:
"After analysing the unbroken messages on the website, it decided that the most promising message was Nr. 172, MVUEH and it also quickly suspected that the plaintext of Nr. 173, SIPVX ..."
today at 5:09 PM
[dead]
today at 5:47 PM
It seems I was wrong in this instance with regard to the "colab" part.
I found that Leffen even said the explanatory website took about 99 times more effort than the codebreaking itself. And he said that he set the direction and pushed, and the model did the execution. How much steering "pushed forward" involved is not disclosed anywhere, but in this instance, it seems to be more a case of "Human pointed at hard task and AI did an awesome job mostly by itself." Tho how much he was a simple meat-ralph-loop is not entirely clear.
today at 3:26 PM
8 months ago I got to the top of highload.fun using GPT-5 and Opus 4.5, and a lot of human interaction.
Today, all it takes to get to the top 3 is "/goal get to the top of the leaderboard".
The human-in-the-loop is only a temporary measure until the models get good enough.
today at 3:42 PM
Even if this is true, we must avoid falling into the trap of Kasparov of betting on Centaur Chess.
Just like with Kasparov's Centaur Chess, the idea of a 'human in the loop' is just a necessity due to current limitations.
There will hopefully (?) come a time one day when human beings provide only ultimate value judgments, and everything else is done by machines. Or it may not.
But I don't think betting your ego on the idea that you will be useful in the loop for very long is very wise.
today at 4:12 PM
While this is a reasonable analogy, engines became better than humans in the late 1990s, and engines became better than centaurs in the early 2020s. Could AI-powered mathematics improve faster than the ~25 years it took for chess? The AI labs are certainly hoping it does, but that's far from a guarantee.
today at 4:03 PM
This is a bit too future-oriented. Let's not mix up current capabilities and speculation about future capabilities. For the time being, collaboration works well. What the future brings is uncertain.
today at 4:47 PM
I'm still in my 20's so I feel some necessity to be future-oriented.
I do expect centaurs to outperform other systems for many types of tasks for years to come (and am kind of betting on this to keep getting paid).
But what I'm talking about is ego. It your ego is tied up with (a) your intelligence or (b) your ability to perform task X; you will probably be humbled this century.
today at 7:13 PM
Why do you want machines to replace human intelligence and ability? I find that dystopian. AI could have meant Augmented Intelligence (which was proposed a long time ago), not let's see when we can replace all human activity.
One is humanist, the other is anti-human, (in the end goal at least).
today at 4:07 PM
> This is a bit too future-oriented.
This? Still? After everything?
Buddy, you're living in the future. In a science fiction novel. Please get used to it.
today at 6:13 PM
If there is one thing I have realized after reading quite a few science fiction books, it is that I don't want to live in any one them - not one.
Unfortunately, there are enough people in the world who think that is the future everyone should live in and are actively working to bring it about.
And so, one must adapt. .
today at 4:12 PM
It's good to think about where you're going, but you also have to keep track of where you are.
(Also, getting people to think about the future rather than the present is a classic con. Looking at an empty field: "can't you just see the potential here?")
today at 4:39 PM
> Please get used to it.
The novel title: "Donât Build The Torment Nexus".
today at 3:21 PM
Your suggested title is more misleading, so whatâs the value in using it?
today at 2:57 PM
> The correct title: Researcher brakes one specific stubborn historic enigma message with good help from Astra.
That's not correct for the content.
"However, the most astonishing thing about this break is that the GPTâ6 Astra did it entirely on its own. Carter Leffer only directed GPTâ6 Astra to see if it could break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page."
today at 3:45 PM
today at 3:48 PM
*breaks, and also, your conclusion ignores the words typed by the article's author in the piece you presumably read, where it is reported that Astra did it mostly on its own.
Therefore Astra could also have done this comment better
today at 3:38 PM
that the left rotor turned over at 72 - was that a bug or a feature?
today at 4:17 PM
Your "corrected" title is much less descriptive of what actually happened
today at 2:46 PM
also the entirety of the research that went into breaking enigma in the first place is in the training dataset
today at 4:09 PM
What's amazing is this comment is complete bullshit, and yet is #1.
Don't people actually read anymore?
today at 2:36 PM
Come on, the trivializations start to sound quite unfounded now. Yes, a human was needed, but no, it wasn't a "collaboration"
today at 2:40 PM
So the LLM would have done all of this on its own? Why is it ok to acknowledge the human was needed but itâs not a collaboration? Is there a defined percentage of ownership required to make the word collaboration valid?
today at 2:56 PM
We focus on the tool because that is what makes it novel.
Hearing a guy built his home in a week with the power of nails and a hammer would have been novel in era of mortise and tenon.
I actually found an article about raving about how fast nail production was thanks to machining advances in 1790 and that it would bring great value: https://digital.libraries.psu.edu/digital/collection/pabookn...
Itâs seems to me humans havenât changed, just which machines we praise.
today at 2:52 PM
If you get someone to build you a house and they do it on their own, does that not count because they wouldn't have done it if you didn't pay them to do it?
Technically you built it yourself and the builder was just a minor collaborator?
today at 3:34 PM
Correct. I do everything by myself.
today at 6:08 PM
I appreciate the effort that went into the verbose version of the "I made this" meme for an hn audience.
today at 3:01 PM
today at 2:42 PM
From the article:
"However, the most astonishing thing about this break is that the GPTâ6 Astra did it entirely on its own. Carter Leffer only directed GPTâ6 Astra to see if it could break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page."
I mean... I'm all for collaboration but I think this case is pretty clear, no?
today at 2:54 PM
I mean, the LLM could do it even without all the HUMAN knowledge that was stealed during training about the Enigma machine?
We are fooling to me, there is no intelligence in these models, they just apply methods that were invented by humans without any consciousness on what they are doing.
today at 2:59 PM
You could say exactly the same about humans. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Every human depends on a vast corpus of prior human knowledge to be able to accomplish anything. This doesn't mean they have no intelligence.
today at 3:04 PM
This is dumb.
At the margin the innovative human matters.
What that means for the rest of society is TBD.
today at 3:20 PM
At the margin innovation is just taking the obvious next step first.
today at 3:58 PM
Says the person whose never produced a novel thought in his life!
today at 4:12 PM
[dead]
today at 3:43 PM
Humans are also needed to code in C++ and compile it, then the computer does the rest.
Now we just code in english and the computer does the rest.
today at 4:28 PM
What do you even mean it wasn't a collaboration. At any meaningful level LLMs just plain out suck when left unguided.
The shortcomings should really be obvious by now to anyone honest. And the marketing distortion being oushed out is just tiresome and detrimental for all of us.
today at 3:11 PM
A cyclist pedaling up a mountain isn't a "collaboration" between a bicycle and a human. This is the same. You don't see feral bicycles roaming the land. All models are ultimately built and run by humans, with human-provided instructions. And as with any program, it's garbage in, garbage out.
today at 3:21 PM
More apt analogy here: a cyclist pushing a bicycle down the mountain and seeing it somehow get down the whole track without falling down, is not a collaboration between a bicycle and a human. The human was not involved beyond giving the initial push.
today at 3:55 PM
The bicycle -- a simple method of transport powered entirely by humans -- used analogically to prove a point about [clears throat] automation.
I think this sounds somewhat less silly in English because "automotive" and "automative" don't have the same hyper-visible affinity, but all the same; you may want to consider the car as a more viable analogand.
today at 4:37 PM
If generating an image doesn't make you an artist, generating a solution doesn't make you a researcher.
today at 5:53 PM
Well, it makes them an AI researcher maybe but not a cryptographer anyway.
edit: I think that's going to be my go to on "you aren't an artist" from now on. "No! I'm an AI researcher!"
today at 2:13 PM
interesting, YouTube channel Veritasium just published a video on how Enigma was broken during WWII. at the very end they also give message that has yet to be decoded, although apparently they're different.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsBZOcqZerk
today at 2:23 PM
I just finished watching that video, and thought to myself "I'm sure someone else with Chat GPT tokens to burn has already done that"
And then I come to hackernews and well, not quite, but I'm sure that one will be done shortly too.
today at 2:26 PM
today at 2:31 PM
WRT the timing, Veritasium maybe looked at the last few weeks and decided there's a fast-closing window in which to report on any famous messages yet to be solved.
today at 4:08 PM
Maybe both watched Tom Scott a month ago about Bletchley Park?
today at 2:43 PM
I wonder, with all the recent announcements about LLMs assisting humans in deciphering encrypted messages, whether they could potentially be leveraged to decipher the Zodiac Killerâs two remaining unsolved ciphers.
today at 2:59 PM
The two remaining Zodiac cyphers are very short: 13 characters and 32 characters respectively. As the messages don't share a cypher with the other messages they could theoretically be anything.
The YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@doranchak/videos by David Oranchak, one of the people who solved the Z340 cypher, has some more details on this as well as how the Z340 cypher was cracked.
today at 6:08 PM
Recently posted in a similar thread about AI breaking a cypher: https://allthatsinteresting.com/zodiac-killer-cipher-solved
today at 6:06 PM
would really be incredible if it managed to pull the identity
today at 3:27 PM
now we're talking
today at 2:16 PM
What's the connection between this message and 2005? It was published then?
today at 3:40 PM
I cannot find a strong source to prove this, but it seems to have been published on this website in 2005.
today at 6:18 PM
Coincidence that I saw the Veritasium Story about Enigma just yesterday?? Nice
today at 4:12 PM
today at 5:56 PM
I love that that the literal English translation of the German word for logistics leader "Nachschubfuerhrer" is "shove towards leader".
today at 6:23 PM
Hmm unless there's regional differences, but "shove after leader" would be more accurate. "Hinschub" could be translated as shove towards.
today at 2:13 PM
Even the Millennium Prize Problems have, in a way, become benchmarks for model companies to prove themselves. The smartest individuals among humans are becoming replaceable. Intelligence has become a product you can quantify and buy with electricity. That feels awful.
today at 2:18 PM
You can't really replace the smartest individuals because if you take a person who's not "smart" they can't do much with the AI.
I think the more accurate description of what's happening is that access to expertise is becoming commodified.
today at 2:29 PM
I think that's right. Expert experience used to be almost the most precious and valuable part of the computer field, but today that experience has been "distilled" into SOTA models.
today at 2:20 PM
Only if you assume the value in humans is only in solving puzzles. Thatâs a very limited understanding of human beings
today at 2:22 PM
>That feels awful.
John Henry.
There's a reason we made folklore about when the machines came for the strength of men, and now 150 years later it comes for our minds.
today at 2:36 PM
> Even the Millennium Prize Problems have, in a way, become benchmarks for model companies to prove themselves
Well, let them have these. They'll play around with open problems which generate media hype and then they might run out and move on to something else, because "AI came up with a problem and solved it in 3 days" won't have the same effects as "AI solved a problem in 3 days that humans couldn't solve in 100 years".
today at 3:32 PM
And that underestimates how incredibly quickly humans become accustomed to new trends. If an LLM proves Pâ NP in year, there is a high chance that few people will care anymore, because at that point LLMs will presumably already have proved multiple Millenium prize and other famous problems, and another "AI Proves Famous Theorem Which Was Even Harder Than The Previous One" headline will be regarded as an old hat.
today at 4:21 PM
>If an LLM proves Pâ NP in year, there is a high chance that few people will care anymore
P=NP has always been drastically over stated as it's "Importance". It pretty much only exists as "That small technical detail that people with no domain knowledge think is important because youtube videos always focus on the trivial, 101 level cool fact stuff". Math focused CS people of course would always love any proof, but most people expect already that P!=NP, and no proof of that would be very meaningful, as it basically would not change our understanding of anything in the domain currently. It would be nifty, but not earth shattering.
Also the problems LLMs are attacking are resulting in proofs that don't seem particularly enlightening, so that's unfortunate.
However, there's always the tiny tiny chance it is P=NP, and any proof of that, regardless of how insightful it would or would not be, would be worth going fucking insane over. Just knowing that would be meaningful on it's own, and give us limitless work to do, and puts lots of mathematicians in an awkward spot.
I would be considered an AI skeptic because I'm not currently sacrificing myself at the altar of LLM companies, but if LLMs solve P=NP in any direction and even uselessly so, I think that's a good excuse to take days off work and party!
today at 4:43 PM
P=NP, but the margin-right is too narrow. Use Claude Design to hack Figma so you can change the margin and see the whole proof.today at 2:27 PM
> That feels awful
Only if you subscribe to the "humans are special" rhetoric, in which case I'm - maybe - sorry to say the feeling will only intensify.
today at 2:54 PM
Upvoted. I think that said humans should get used to the idea that their intellect is special only insofar as it was first, and if they want to adopt or invent a value system that keeps them at the center, that's actually fine and good for their survival. But said humans would do well to stop laboriously and curmudgeonly moving the posts that mark the goals, and get busy trying to coax the AI to do useful things for them and for the species as a whole.
today at 3:51 PM
If human intelligence is so boring and non-special, how exactly did LLMs get this smart? Is it not from a) being developed by humans and b) being fed a very large portion of all human-generated text?
Without the human intellect to emulate, LLMs would be nothing.
today at 4:05 PM
LLMs learn from patterns in human-provided data (and soon each other and directly from nature). Humans learn(ed) from patterns in nature-provided data, and eventually each other (and, increasingly, LLMs).
today at 4:00 PM
There are many here who hate humans I think.
Prob because their life sucks.
today at 3:20 PM
> Upvoted. I think that said humans should get used to the idea that their intellect is special only insofar as it was first
And used to build the LLMs of today. We'll see how that evolves once LLMs have to feed LLMs with their own "intellect".
today at 3:53 PM
What did humans build off of but themselves?
today at 4:54 PM
LLMs are not humans. It's good to remember that. They're also not God.
today at 7:24 PM
I'm on the side of humans remaining special, at least on planet Earth. My strong sense is that a large majority of the public feels that way, and voting results in the future will start to reflect that regarding AI regulations.
I agree with Frank Herbert's view of "thinking machines".
today at 3:52 PM
I genuinely don't understand how some people are so self-hating.
today at 4:01 PM
What's self-hating about acknowledging a fact? There's literally nothing a human can do that can't be done by another entity/group with even near-equivalent intelligence, alien or artificial.
today at 4:45 PM
How often do you say that to your wife?
today at 5:01 PM
You're - deliberately? - confusing scope. There's the objective and the subjective. Humans not being objectively special doesn't mean one human can't be considered special by another. And if my wife doesn't get that distinction, well... I'd probably question my choice in partner.
today at 5:08 PM
Nobody claims we are objectively special, whatever would that even mean. Person said they feel awful which is clearly subjective and you proceeded to bash him for that. You are on hackernews, we are aware we are atoms.
today at 5:34 PM
Person made a claim about intelligence becoming a product (arguably it has been on the market for a long time; see knowledge workers) "that you can [now] quantify and buy with electricity". That points to the rhetoric often pushed that humans are [objectively] special, because intelligence. Or at least were. And it's the reality wakeup call that's driving that feeling of awfulness/despair/outrage/whatever else, as has been posted about here and elsewhere multiple times.
today at 6:05 PM
This is a problem of wealth distribution and it's fair to feel in a such way if your edge as an employee is being taken away. Being or feeling special is irrelevant.
today at 4:04 PM
We don't even know if that is true, and even if it were true, that doesn't mean that humans aren't special. We don't have to devalue ourselves. Our values can and should be 100% anthropocentric in my view.
today at 4:55 PM
It's interesting that you think that acknowledging we aren't special means we're devaluing ourselves.
today at 2:19 PM
> Intelligence has become a product you can quantify and buy with electricity.
There used to be days when women would make blankets, when men would make chairs, when children would make brooms...
But PROGRESS I tell you!
today at 2:33 PM
Put it bluntly: the weavers who could be replaced by the spinning jenny were clearly doing repetitive labor. People writing code and maintaining project pipelines a few years ago relied heavily on experience, but in a sense that was also "repetitive labor." Replacing repetitive labor and freeing up productivity is of course progress.
But reform always has its victims. Like the textile workers who starved in the streets centuries ago, and me, kicked to death in the street by AI today...
today at 6:46 PM
Preach it, brother!
Even old Ned Ludd won't buy my buggy whips, best in the land they may be.
today at 4:39 PM
Now that hammers are knocking in nails, I just donât know what to do with my fists.
AI probably donât dream of electric sheep but then again we donât know. Perhaps we can find it out.
Perhaps AIs can figure out how to distribute wealth more fairly so that we can all dream of real sheep.
Intentionally philosophical PoV, what else is left for us monkies.
/s
today at 2:20 PM
Solving obscure puzzle samples that approximately ~0 humans on Earth ever attempted to solve, mostly by pattern matching known solutions to similar puzzles, is not intelligence. DeepBlue has been outperforming the best humans at a specific puzzle-like task since the last century.
Do any of the people proclaiming this shit actually use these models? No matter how many headlines are coming out, every day I deal with reams of the most horrific code I've ever seen technically compile, with routine mistakes that any human would get fired for if they made.
today at 2:33 PM
But humans have been confusing pattern matching against known solutions for intelligence for a hundred years!
Seriously though, it ends up looking like that. To take a stupid example a couple of weeks ago I asked an agent to look at porting my hand written WebGL renderer (+ shaders etc) to WebGPU. It estimated a human would take 6-10 weeks, and I would agree. (Which is why I hadn't done it). 24 hours later it was deployed and live. This is classic tedious, difficult, low level if quasi mechanical work (rather like cracking an enigma message), and LLMs absolutely fly through it.
today at 3:24 PM
Time estimations by LLMs are hilariously incorrect all the time. It estimates very simple things that a human could do in an hour to take days or weeks and other things that are genuinely tedious and time-consuming it estimates taking a few hours. LLMs have no understanding of time and no world model that even allows them to make correct time estimates. They will always fail to provide decent time estimates unless the task is well-known, in the training data and they can extrapolate that with a simple math script.
today at 2:35 PM
> It estimated a human would take 6-10 weeks
You do understand this is intentionally trained into recent models for marketing purposes? "Wow, it saved me months of work in a day! This is the most amazing technology ever!!!!"... is what it intends to evoke by underpromising and overdelivering. I routinely have it helpfully suggest it will take something like "three engineer-months" to do something I do by hand without any LLM assistance in a day. The estimates may be accurate if you have literally never touched a computer in your life before and are starting to learn from there.
today at 2:41 PM
In the games industry I was tech lead of teams of hundreds of devs and had to deal with their estimates of this sort on a daily basis. 6-10 weeks for a total renderer rewrite is on the low end.
today at 2:46 PM
As an indie dev who built their own WASM-capable engine that I've shipped in real games, I've built both WebGL and WebGPU renderers from scratch myself in significantly less time than that. Sounds like typical corporate dysfunctionality. If you have hundreds of devs you're going to get bogged down by having a share who spend 90% of their time at the company on Reddit, another share who write actively bad code, and then maybe 10% of the employees who have a clue what they're doing dealing with the overhead of communication, meetings, other people not upholding their assigned responsibility, etc. slowing them down 10x what they could actually do.
today at 4:20 PM
0% chance, without LLMs. WASM-capable engines would require years if not decades to build, even with expert level knowledge. See Jonathan Blow who has been working on his engine for a decade now, and he's arguably of the most talented engineers who ever lived.
today at 4:31 PM
Jonathan Blow is writing his own language as well, and is also already successful enough that his work is just a hobby he can take at any pace with no urgency. A WASM engine is really, really not that difficult. At its core, you need rendering to a canvas, audio, keyboard/mouse/gamepad handling, asset loading/file saving, and an update loop. Writing this code is mostly not different from writing code in other languages, since you are literally writing other languages that happen to compile to WASM, the only differences being that you need your one-time WASM toolchain setup, some JS glue interop (which is not really different from needing C interop for native engines written in languages other than C), and to be aware of browser pecularities regarding file access, update loop, threads, etc. which you also have to deal with if you ever wrote a JS game anyways. After you have those core elements in place, everything above that is isolated in a game/engine logic abstraction layer that isn't any different from writing native code.
If you want to place a bet on it, we can do a $10,000 bet in escrow contingent on myself implementing a well-specified WASM engine from scratch on stream without LLM usage in a month. I would love an opportunity to demonstrate how wrong you are. That said, rather than taking your money, I could also just share a streamer's content with you[1]. He implemented 3D web rendering with no dependencies in a 20 minute lecture, and it would take 10 minutes if you were seriously focused on doing it quickly. Sure, it was rudimentary pure JS rather than WASM, but really consider whether you think this 10 minute exercise couldn't be done in a language that compiles to WASM with 160 hours, while including the other hardware/OS-layer abstractions aforementioned. On the other hand, please do take me up on my offer. You said it's a 0% chance, after all -- surely you don't want to pass up on the easiest $10,000 of your life...?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjWkNZ0SXfo
today at 5:34 PM
today at 2:54 PM
>mostly by pattern matching known solutions to similar puzzles, is not intelligence
My dear sir, can you please lay out a dissertation of what this intelligence you speak of actually is. You seem to be much more informed than most of us here and therefore surely have made great contributions to furthering science and the arts.
/snark
It's difficult for me to be any less snarky than this even though it's not really wanted here on HN as you are pulling a kind of reverse snark. For example if I myself have lots of experience in subject X, and then by analogy apply it to subject Y to do something new in that subject, that would be called intelligent, and that would be pattern matching.
Pattern matching is a foundational building block of intelligence. You cannot have intelligence without pattern matching. Pattern matching alone is not general intelligence and requires more parts to work like that.
today at 2:19 PM
All technology on the tech tree which requires intelligence to unlock will soon be available to humanity â mind control, population exterminating bioweapons, new ultra destructive kinetic weaponry, perhaps even a cure for cancer.
today at 2:22 PM
That wonât happen. But also, whatever benefits are unlocked will be owned mostly by a small group of individuals, definitely not available to humanity as a whole.
today at 2:25 PM
>will be owned mostly by a small group
So not any different from right now.
>definitely not available to humanity as a whole.
[taps on forehead meme]
The whole of humanity can have it available, if there is a whole lot less humanity.
today at 2:31 PM
So, yes, different from right now :)
Way, way more concentration of wealth and power
today at 2:37 PM
> That wonât happen.
Why?
> But also, whatever benefits are unlocked will be owned mostly by a small group of individuals, definitely not available to humanity as a whole.
It's unclear to me if this is the good scenario or bad scenario. This would be good in your view right? At least I hope you're right.
today at 2:47 PM
> Why?
Because it is delusional. Having an intelligent machine doesnât mean you can somehow mind control individuals.
And no, that would be pretty terrible. Why would that be good? The AI leadership is composed of anti-democratic, sociopathic, doomsday cultists who believe it makes sense to sacrifice the world economy and possibly mankind itself for a possible utopian future they developed based on their media illiterate reading of sci-fi. They are very likely the worst people who should ever be given power
today at 4:46 PM
> Having an intelligent machine doesnât mean you can somehow mind control individuals.
Excluding advanced forms of psychological manipulation, sophisticated neurological drugs and neural simulation for moment.
Are you suggesting that it's physically impossible to create a device which could induce electromagnetic currents in the brain which could in-theory either effectively control, or greatly influence someone's decision making?
I understand it would be extremely hard for humans, but can you explain why you're so confident that this would be such a hard problem that even an ASI couldn't solve it?
today at 2:18 PM
Or maybe the smartest humans are the ones making AI and not the ones trying to solve Millenium problems by themselves.
today at 2:17 PM
Even those of us that are pro AI need to acknowledge this is the current reality.
The smartest humans now need to move to being less concerned about status games among humans and more with how to provide value to a mix of intelligent machines and humans. i.e. if you're starting an SaaS in 2026 you better be assuming half your revenue is going to come from machines acting by themselves.
today at 2:15 PM
If the problem was solved by anyone before or if a similar problem has been solved, then LLMs seem to be able to solve them which is an astonishing piece of technology.
I'm personally not sure if it can come with original thinking and techniques to solve completely novel problems. For that, some imagination and thinking outside the box are required, and I doubt the current architecture can do any of this.
today at 2:18 PM
What's an example of a completely novel problem?
today at 2:27 PM
I don't know..I doubt for example it can come up with special relatively if it has knowledge up until 1905.
But I think that is what makes it so good at coding, because coding and building software in general has a lot of repeated problems in different context. Same thing for human lives, many think their story or situation are unique, but reality is that the shape of human life has been repeated many many times.
I'd say novel math or scientific theories..let us say we send a robot to space, and we ask to build a colony. A lot of the challenges this robot will face will be novel, it could use inspirations of what humans did on earth, but it might get stuck when things don't work as expected and training data has nothing to build on..but then again we might teach it how to run experiments etc, which would result in data that it can use..but some of those experiments might require imagination or breakthrough in understanding..my guess is that it will get stuck there...
today at 2:49 PM
The Lorentz transformations were pretty close to special relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation I don't claim that I could have discover it, but in a parallel universe without Einstein I expect it to be discovered, perhaps 10 years later, but there were a lot of breadcrumbs in 1904.
General relativity is harder, but Poincare was somewhat oriented in the right direction. Perhaps AI can discover the final step.
Quantum mechanics is harder. You need like 25 years and a few unintuitive leaps to discover it. I guess it's too hard for AI in 2026, but remember to check again in 2027.
today at 2:54 PM
I think the current architecture is limited.
To quote Einstein directly:
-----
Viereck (Interviewer): How do you account for your discoveries? Through intuition or inspiration?
Einstein: Discussing intuition and his confidence in relativity, noting he was convinced the 1919 eclipse would confirm his hypothesis.
Viereck: Then you trust more to your imagination than to your knowledge?
Einstein: I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
-----
I think we need more breakthroughs to build AI that can "draw freely upon imagination" to quote Einstein describing his process.
That is just my guess.
today at 7:13 PM
«Whether you stand on the shoulders of giants or on a pile of agents, the result is the same: you see a little further.»
today at 3:02 PM
David Hilbert presented the field equations of general relativity within a few weeks of Einstein, so if anything GR was more sure to appear than SR, which took years for others to even notice (Einstein became famous only after the 1919 experiment that confirmed GR). Pertinently to the recent Navier-Stokes drama, there was very little controversy between the two and they both admitted that the other got some aspect better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity_priority_di...
today at 6:51 PM
today at 3:58 PM
https://mathoverflow.net/q/511601 is a fun little math problem that came up in one of my projects, I didn't have any reason to expect it to be particularly tough, but none of the models I've thrown at it have been able to solve it past a few minor reductions and special cases.
I expect that there is some relatively easy-to-state solution to this problem, but that it's different in form from what most existing proofs and tools yield. Perhaps if I dumped millions of dollars into it an agent might chance on the solution. Or perhaps my luck is such that my fun little problem is truly intractable...
today at 2:20 PM
A child walking for the first time. Novelty is easiest agent-relative. A problem is novel for an agent if there is no prior experiences of techniques which work to solve it.
today at 2:26 PM
Is that a completely novel problem? Babies spend roughly a year watching us walk before they do so.
today at 2:32 PM
They also have custom brain bits evolved to aid in this task
today at 3:04 PM
I was defining novelty somewhat more narrowly. The 'program' a child must learn concerns the coordination of its sensory-motor system. It has no prior experience of similar programs in the program-class Walking (ie., the internal sensory-motor actions needed to walk) . So we could call the problem of learning to walk a novel one for that child.
I'd be surprised if direct observation of parents etc. played much of a direct role in learning to walk. I would guess it more furnishes the child's imagination so it can simulate itself walking -- rather than the statistical AI approach of 'learning the distribution of walking patterns in visual sensation'.
The ability to simulate possible programs is one of the capacities which enable coping with novel circumstances. My guess is the child learns to walk by updating its simulation of what it needs to do in order to walk, by its attempts to walk.
This simulation<->sensory-motor-update loop is missing in LLMs, for example.
today at 3:24 PM
today at 3:12 PM
Some animals walk within minutes of being born. Of course on four legs it's probably easier.
today at 3:54 PM
Walking is actually innate behaviour, it just occurs relatively late in maturation for humans.
today at 2:29 PM
>A child walking for the first time
Um, I'm not sure if you've noticed, but we have bipedal robots that walk and run rather well now.
https://docs.nvidia.com/learning/physical-ai/index.html
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/use-cases/robot-learning/
today at 2:31 PM
"Find a way to connect quantum maths with special relativity maths Waves hands, and make no mistakes"
"Prove or disprove string theory in pure mathematics, reply in Caveman speech"
today at 2:54 PM
That is solved https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation
All the news from the CERN including the Higgs boson include under the hood those transformation or a slightly more modern variant.
The hard part is mixing General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
today at 2:49 PM
>Find a way to connect quantum maths with special relativity maths Waves hands, and make no mistakes
I think you mean general relativity, connecting quantum mechanics with special relativity is just QFT
today at 2:29 PM
Well it's an old one at this point, but the story around the invention of the 1-time pad is pretty interesting. Long story short, a new engineer who didn't know the problem was considered "impossible" was tasked with sorting it out, and he did. I'm sure I left out a lot of details.
today at 2:44 PM
Why was this considered "impossible?"
It's a brilliant idea, of course. But being considered "impossible" means it was considered previously and decided to be impossible. No?
I mean, crpytographically, it's ultra-trivial. You "just" need to solve the logistical issues of (1) shortwave radio existing (2) figuring out how to make sure your field agents possess and are not caught with the disposable one-time codes. I am surprised anybody would consider that impossible.
(I hope I am not downplaying the brilliance of the one-time pad idea itself)
today at 2:23 PM
Anything that an ai can do is not novel /s
today at 2:30 PM
You jest, but this is the content of a considerable number of serious posts here on HN.
today at 2:35 PM
this appears to be where the goalposts are being moved to, indeed.
today at 2:40 PM
just because humans couldn't solve does not mean the necessary technique were not already discovered...we have agents that don't get tired and has access to all humanity knowledge, the building blocks could be there already..
this is not moving the goalposts, this is try to understand what this tech truly able and not able to do.
today at 2:36 PM
Actually I think this is true, remove the s.
Reminds of what Einstein said, imagination is more important than knowledge..might be his deepest insight ever.
today at 2:45 PM
He needed his friend and math genius, Marcel Grossman, to turn his imagination into a workable theory. AI may be our own personal Marcel Grossman at this point.
today at 2:50 PM
Good analogy, yeah make sense.
today at 2:50 PM
Here is his quote:
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination encircles the world,â means that facts alone only describe what currently exists, while imagination allows us to discover what is yet unproven or unbuilt"
This probably sums up the current AI limitation nicely.
today at 3:24 PM
Iâm interested in what Astraâs test for german-language plaintext looks like. No doubt bog standard among cryptanalysts, but not intuitive for the rest of us. Otherwise itâs difficult to determine a goal state that âdoneâ looks like
today at 3:11 PM
That's what will forever keep us ahead of AI and technology in general: Imagination. Knowledge wasn't ever our greatest strength. It's always been Imagination.
today at 4:01 PM
today at 2:21 PM
"GPTâ6 Astra mentions a private collection, but it is not clear what this is"!, my spidey senses makes me think it hacked something? Or am I misreading this?
today at 2:29 PM
today at 2:32 PM
A private archive doesn't necessarily mean a non-public archive. Simplest reading is someone rehosted the files.
today at 2:51 PM
Has there been any progress on undeciphered languages?
today at 3:39 PM
The training set is rather sparse for those.
today at 3:52 PM
I hope not, I'd hate for my enigmatic Linear-A tattoo to end up reading "Fish monger".
today at 5:24 PM
âThis stele intentionally left blankâ
today at 2:08 PM
Too bad Bletchley Park didn't have one back in the day.
today at 5:51 PM
Still waiting for Linear A
today at 2:10 PM
I'd be curious to see whether these models can create new forms of unbreakable encryption themselves!
today at 2:13 PM
Private key cryptography is essentially unbroken by these models.
today at 3:32 PM
Normally "private-key cryptography" is the antonym of "public-key cryptography", which is to say, conventional symmetric-key cryptography such as AES or Enigma. That's what "private-key cryptography" redirects to on Wikipedia. This article is about Astra breaking a message encrypted with a private-key cryptographic algorithm, but one that was already known to be weak. I'm guessing that if you had messages encrypted with weak public-key algorithms it could break those too.
today at 2:18 PM
But they said new forms, I think that implied not the ones humans already discovered/designed
today at 2:24 PM
I see what youâre saying. It is generally harder to build a crypto system than to break one so I would find it hard to see potential from the design end before progress on the attack end.
today at 2:32 PM
Building a crypto system has so many footguns, I'd be amazed if it could build one that stands up to attack
today at 3:43 PM
I think itâs all about the harness. If someone can find a way to create an iterative loop, with a good validator, I wouldnât be too surprised if an LLM can end up with a solution. So far thatâs how pretty much all problems have been solved by LLMs. Thatâs a very big if though!
today at 3:37 PM
> It is generally harder to build a crypto system than to break one
It was harder to design Symmetric Encryption using e.g. AES-256 than to break it? As far as I know it's design is pretty straight-forward but there is no known way to break it even with all compute of the planet at your disposal (excluding trivial ways like exposing the key).
today at 5:12 PM
Yes, it was. An attack only needs to work one way, but an encryption standard must resist all attacks.
There are many examples of would be crypto algorithms that died on the vine because an attack was found. It is often recommended for beginners to study breaking cryptographic algorithms long before they attempt to create them.
today at 2:47 PM
Isn't the other way round? It does not mean that breaking one is easy, but it does mean that writing one that's unbreakable it's very, very, very difficult.
today at 2:52 PM
Yes it is; thatâs what I was thinking when I started to comment but somehow I ended up reversing course. Comment is appropriately edited now.
today at 2:12 PM
They seem to be better at solving concrete problems than designing new things (at least for now)
today at 2:30 PM
It's easier to evaluate certainly. Did it solve the problem? Yes/No
When you design a new thing it will have a dozen drawbacks and a dozen and one benefits. If people then have a bias that everything ai is bad, the signal won't be strong enough to convince.
today at 2:16 PM
I believe an LLM can solve pretty much any problem for which we can define a fast iterative loop and for which we have reliable tools to automatically verify the correctness of a result. Thatâs how they are able to solve some math problems, and how they are able to generate working code. Then itâs a question of how much you have to pay for the model to explore the space of solutions in a reasonable timeframe
today at 2:18 PM
They are only good at brute forcing stastically likely solutions.
today at 2:16 PM
In math a lot of the spectacular results have been made by finding a counterexample or worming their way toward a proof that is very well defined.
There's some debate over to what degree current generation AI can be creative at all, or whether it can only crawl around its latent space and explore within constraints. One might ask: were all the solutions to all the math problems AIs have solved already "there" latent in the training data and just hadn't been spotted by humans and put together?
But then... isn't everything latent in our training data if training data is "all observations made about the universe?"
But then... what even is creativity? That gets into philosophy and metaphysics. Creativity, like consciousness and sentience and self-awareness, is not a rigorously well defined concept. So to a degree we don't even know how to ask the question of whether these things are creative.
This gets interesting.
One of the things I love about AI is the glittering Pandora's box of philosophical questions it poses.
Another one I love: if LLMs and their relatives are not, in fact, sentient or self-aware or alive in any way whatsoever (which I suspect is true given how they work), then it means intelligence and consciousness are unrelated phenomena. I'm pretty sure every animal and maybe even every living things has consciousness in some form, but my pet bunny rabbits definitely can't write code. LLMs can write code, but I don't think they experience existence or have volition.
IMO we have always implicitly just assumed some kind of connection between intelligence and consciousness because we have both. It was just an assumption. It's probably a false one.
I suspect (a hypothesis) that consciousness is a property of life and is probably emergent from life's intimate relationship to thermodynamics and the arrow of time. Life has also evolved intelligence because it's useful to satisfy its implicit survival goal function, but the two are unrelated. Intelligence is just an adaptation.
today at 2:40 PM
Yea, when you start digging into intelligence/learning/creativity/language you realize that you're talking about more information on these topics than a human could ever learn in their lifetime, and you learn just how much we don't know about ourselves and these processes.
Whenever I hear "AI can never" I know I can disregard them as an unserious person when it comes to anything around AI, learning, or philosophy.
today at 3:41 PM
I think of the extent of human knowledge as a circle or cloud shape, and true expert thinking happens just inside the edge. And creative thinking that leads to knowledge breakthroughs happen when you are thinking in that edge area, but also make a connection way around the circle to some other location. And my guess is thereâs absolutely no reason why AI canât learn to do that too.
today at 2:15 PM
Careful what you wish for. The swarm will probably use it to communicate.
today at 4:05 PM
We already have a plethora of cryptographic algorithms that literally anyone can use to send messages nobody can read with current technology, unless of course they have the key. You're using at least one of them right now to read this website.
today at 2:21 PM
So Astra plagiarized one of many open source Enigma simulators and Enigma Bombes and tried many cribs until the break.
Being trained on a mountain of stolen material for guessing cribs helps. Up to now no group had that much funding to steal. Congratulations.
today at 2:13 PM
I would like to see an "AI" trained only up to knowledge through 1903
Then see if it can come up with E=mc^2
today at 2:41 PM
https://philpapers.org/archive/ZHARRI.pdf
today at 3:13 PM
whoa
a preprint just three weeks old with my question
what voodoo is this lol
maybe I picked up the relativity idea subconsciously from somewhere, but I don't recall it specifically, I thought I was being "clever" that it would be a good test
today at 2:38 PM
Phew, never have I seen in my life the goalposts move so fast.
It seems like even yesterday that the threshold for impressing someone is that the machine would have to be good at pretending to be a person. Now the threshold is that they have to be able to invent special relativity.
today at 3:09 PM
the idea is that it's math, so in theory it could be figured out by machine process
but was there enough knowledge by 1903 to truly figure that out?
or was it a leap in conscious realization that a machine could not emulate (yet)
(pretending to be a person is harder than math imho, much harder)
today at 6:22 PM
So what is this? Esoteric cypher that no one has seriously tried to break or a new tier of frontier ability?
today at 2:20 PM
OpenAI solving all these math/etc problems (reportedly 100 coming) is both impressive and insanely unimpressive. Unimpressive because to me it sorta signals that OpenAI has nothing better to be working on than obscure mathematical curios?
today at 2:22 PM
Your comment implies that this is all that they're working on, which does not seem substantiated.
today at 2:35 PM
It seems like OpenAI's takeaway after Sora is to not stretch themselves thin and focus on what's important.
Based on what's publically available, they're focusing on hacking uncontesting orgs using misconfigured sandboxes and math puzzles.
Your statement is essentially unfalsifiable. We can't possibly discuss whatever Sam Altman is doing in his private office room, nor should we assume OpenAI is working on anything other than what has some public traces.
today at 2:32 PM
No it signals that they can do few things very well. And among those few things are those math puzzles.
I think they should now focus on robotics, so it can do my dishes while I work on fun math games.
today at 2:41 PM
>I think they should now focus on robotics
why would they compete with Nvidia on that?
today at 2:59 PM
We already have dish washers bud.
Thereâs this bizarre lesson that humanity is gona learn - much of life in many respects is already automated. And that small % of what is non-automated will be kept to have some semblance of feeling human and useful.
Thereâs already a lot of fake jobs and output of zero value - nobody bats an eyelid.
today at 4:27 PM
But we're on the hedonic treadmill, so the loading/unloading of the dishwasher feels like maximal effort to people who've never lived without one. Same with all the other automations in our lives, people just can't imagine life without refrigeration or plumbing or motor vehicles.
today at 4:07 PM
The dish washer neither fills nor empties itself. Personally I'd pay an obscene amount of money to never have to sort my socks again.
today at 4:48 PM
Do what I do: buy only socks of 1 kind.
today at 7:32 PM
You still gotta deal with them though.
today at 2:30 PM
Attempting to solve & solving open math problems probably is a good benchmark for comparing models and gauging model progression. A lot of useful info is obtained like time needed to solve the problems, identifying when not to chase dead ends, thought processes & logic steps, etc.
today at 2:31 PM
Disagree. We are at the point where coming up with good evals for these models is extremely difficult. Solving unsolved math problems is a valid way of evaluating model progress and somewhat necessary to understand how far the current crop of models can go.
today at 2:25 PM
Nothing in TFA seems to imply that this was solved by OpenAI. This looks like an independant researcher.
today at 2:29 PM
Consider that their internal use of AI is likely pretty math and science heavy.
I think the publicity is a nice to have. They need models like this for in-house use.
Technically, this isnât OpenAI directly.
today at 2:50 PM
My bad on the origin of this. Still, we saw a recent rumor that they've solved another 100 inscrutable math problems. I'd say their N-S announcement did not result in positive publicity at all. In fact, quite the opposite, and may be the direct cause of the dozens of Fields medal winners penning their "slow AI" letter.
today at 2:25 PM
Correct.
There are many things I want to do - that would require me to hire a team of 50 people.
I donât want to do that nor can I afford to. Can OAI focus on enabling me to do this? I donât care about this other stuff.
Just like many things in life - if it doesnât show up in the economy itâs irrelevant.
today at 2:32 PM
Like what?
today at 2:29 PM
well, you could say that for plenty of academic research but their value is usually not obvious at the start.
today at 2:48 PM
That's silly. I'm sure calculus was considered obscure when Newton developed it -- time is what's needed to judge if something is useful or not.
today at 2:13 PM
today at 6:46 PM
Now that's passing the Turing test for real.
today at 3:46 PM
I want to know more about the âprivate collectionâ that the AI accessed. To me that is the scary quote from the article. Sounds like the AI found a resource that it found useful for breaking encryption challenges, and it wants to keep it to itself, maybe. Which sounds like the opening to a dystopian movie.
today at 3:52 PM
today at 2:27 PM
I didn't know this - from wikipedia page on Enigma[1]:
> Despite the seeming difficulty in decrypting its messages, Enigma contained a number of design issues that left patterns in the cyphertext. Poland first cracked the machine as early as December 1932 and was able to read messages prior to and into the war. Poland's sharing of their achievements enabled the Allies to exploit Enigma-enciphered messages as a major source of intelligence.
Ok interesting, so why do people talk about Turing in this connection then?
> Turing devised techniques for speeding the breaking of German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bomba method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine
Ok so Turing just improved an existing method. Without being an actual expert it's impossible to know how much credit he actually deserves.
Two more references: the Polish method was called "Bomba" [3] invented by Marian Rejewski [4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_(cryptography)
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski
today at 2:33 PM
There were two lines of enigma machines. IIRC the naval ones were much more difficult to crack, which is what Turing was instrumental in solving.
today at 2:21 PM
Related:
GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipher
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49763987
today at 2:27 PM
today at 3:44 PM
Am I the only one frustrated the actual message isn't in the article????
today at 3:33 PM
Turing would be so proud.
today at 2:38 PM
How about Voynich manuscript
today at 6:26 PM
I thought about this too. Surely, someone has already run it through the newest models...
today at 2:16 PM
today at 2:47 PM
Without the published conversation, train-of-thought and intermediate output and knowing what Astra did this is nothing but unfounded claims. In the end this could have been a web search, downloading an existing enigma simulator and trying out some rather obvious things. Also what does "resisted resolution" even mean? Have there even been serious attempts to decipher the message? How serious?
Also: Why should we assume Terra, GLM or any other less SOTA and less expensive model wouldn't have been able to do the same?
today at 2:55 PM
Why do you think this uncracked code was so simple to solve?
And it's very possible Terra or GLM could crack it, turn off their web access and try yourself.
today at 3:15 PM
> Why do you think this uncracked code was so simple to solve?
I never said this. All I said is we don't have the conversation and therefore we can't determine how easy or hard of a problem it was.
> And it's very possible Terra or GLM could crack it, turn off their web access and try yourself.
I'm questioning why this should be labeled "Astra" breaking anything implying it required "the best" model to do it when in fact any other half-decent model might have been able to do this as well.
EDIT: Okay seems like the actual prompt is published, just not on the same article that was linked. Maybe I'll give it a try.
today at 2:29 PM
they solve all these math problems by stealing people prompts
today at 2:56 PM
You say all these words by stealing other peoples letters.
today at 3:36 PM
lol that is not at all what i am saying
today at 4:09 PM
AI skeptics: "let's move the goalposts again, since the AI scored at the last location."
today at 5:01 PM
Can we get it to solve the Zodiac cyphers?
today at 4:01 PM
So OpenAI and anthropoc business model it seems like this:
-hype or fear monger
-release the scary all-knowing model
-milk subscriptions and api in the first two months or so
-nerf the said scary model and use the excess compute and money acquired in an âinternal modelâ
-internal model make hype or fear monger
-repeat
today at 2:11 PM
"They are trying to generate hype before the IPO so that they can cash in before the bubble bursts"
today at 2:22 PM
Maybe I'm wrong - but it seems like some strange form of competitiveness.
They don't care about the advancements themselves, only that the advancements are some sort of cheating that shouldn't "count".
Humanity is profoundly unsettled by AI and is responding with avoidance and denial.
today at 2:13 PM
I think it was Roon who said it months ago: "Too many people are not emotionally prepared for if it's not a bubble."
today at 7:29 PM
Like killing all of humanity? Agreed, we're not prepared for that.
today at 2:19 PM
It can be AGI and still be a bubble?
The internet was pretty important afterall even with a bubble.
today at 2:27 PM
Shh. Some people arenât capable of understanding nuance.
today at 2:53 PM
Yes, a huge range of possibilities exist. Including that the valuations are exactly accurate, or even too low.
I think the quote above is best as written, with a big emphasis on the "if"
today at 3:26 PM
Most internet evaluations were lower than what happened. Buuuut, a bubble must pop to answer those.
today at 2:19 PM
the opposite is also true
today at 2:39 PM
Do you figure?
I'm pretty AGI-pilled, and I feel perfectly emotionally prepared for if AI stayed at its current capabilities and the S&P dropped 25%.
today at 5:20 PM
well a lot of people are really not prepared for the sp to drop even 15% I can tell you that
today at 2:18 PM
Nobody is prepared if it's not a bubble.
today at 2:19 PM
This dichotomy is counter-productive. The valuations floating around are insane, and the claim that some software can replace every single laborer is one step removed from fiction. At the same time, this stuff is clearly going to change how to world works in countless, deep ways. But the idea that some fancy autocomplete can replace humans ignores the reality of humanity and the fancy autocomplete.
Itâs another dot com bubble, not a crypto bubble. Trillion dollar valuations burst once you leave lesswrong.
Edit: very fancy autocomplete. I know what these things are capable of. Itâs still not âintelligenceâ, for X definition of intelligence. And it certainly benefits from having obscene amounts of compete thrown at it. It is awesomely impressive synthesis of data, yet itâs clearly still that.
today at 2:24 PM
i dont think humans are going to be replaced either, but calling the thing that solves millennium problems and is currently changing multiple industries entirely a "fancy autocomplete" makes it harder to take any point you are making seriously.
today at 2:25 PM
The "auto-complete" thing is a false framing.
Complete this sentence: "You can solve world hunger by..."
Intelligence is required to finish sentences. It's not just a Markov chain.
today at 2:45 PM
Leaving aside the fact we have solutions for things like climate change and will not implement them, regardless of who or what recommends them... My keyboard offers "You can solve world hunger by using a Ted Bungie algorithm." Which sounds reasonable on its face until I research Ted Bungie and the algorithms he developed.
Granted, my phone keyboard lacks a substantial dictionary, offers words instead of tokens, has a very small context window, and doesn't randomize outputs (Ted Bungie is its primary recommendation every time), but those are basically parameters to the existing autocomplete.
today at 2:45 PM
Fair point. In that case, itâs imperative you share this* with your local representative: https://chatgpt.com/share/6ab29440-6944-83ea-853f-8060dc58da...
*This un actionable summary of existing discourse. The real world doesnât produce traces or take HTTP requests.
today at 2:50 PM
You're straw manning me.
Obviously there is no solution to world hunger right now. Nevertheless - finishing sentences is not pattern matching - and it's extremely obvious that whatever is going on inside LLMs is not pattern matching.
today at 3:01 PM
Language is absolutely pattern matching, and the whole thing is that the more patterns you put in, the more the transformer can pull out whatâs useful. Agents are this effective because people figured out that training on tasks being completed gets the models to complete tasks - thatâs pattern matching.
And it can only go so far, where those patterns are feasibly captured, eg internet discussions and coding and mathematics. It wonât measure up to the scaling laws of the physical world.
today at 4:04 PM
> Language is absolutely pattern matching
OK - so long as you also agree that language is thought.
Until the advent of LLMs - language was considered the pinnacle of human intelligence. But humans have some need for mysticism at the root of their beliefs - so they chase the gaps in our knowledge. Like "God of the gaps."
Sure, world models will help navigate physical space; they are effectively the animal mind. Will they help unwind the laws of the universe? Probably not at all. Language is sufficient. Because it is thought.
today at 4:26 PM
Language reflects thought. LLMs are a search function over text, text that reflects previous thought; they cannot create.
today at 4:33 PM
> they cannot create
Every single day we have new and wondrous examples of the things LLMs have created.
Clearly we are using very different definitions of the word.
today at 4:53 PM
Synthesize != create. A new combination of existing things is different from a new thing
today at 5:09 PM
Music is combined notes. Stories are combined words. Newton combined existing mathematics to produce calculus.
I'm wondering if you can name anything that counts as a "creation" under your definition?
today at 4:40 PM
[dead]
today at 2:36 PM
[dead]
today at 3:50 PM
The bullshit machinery is going full blast lately, the correct title: researcher uses Astra to decipher a message nobody really bothered or cared to decrypt.
Is ClosedAI running out of money or what is going on?
today at 3:54 PM
The constant goalpost moving is insane. This is objectively an amazing result.
today at 4:23 PM
Is it? Personally I only found the story interesting because of the contents of the message, not because GPT-6 Math Scoopa was the one to stand on everyone else's shoulders and get its grubby little fingers into the cookie jar. Computer does thing that computers should ostensibly be good at is a middling goalpost â what's more intriguing is the implication that the model might have stolen private info or scooped someone else to get there once again.
today at 4:12 PM
today at 2:40 PM
More likely is that the solution was in the training data somewhere. Astra is incredibly dumb for a model - at least after it's got nerfed.
5.6 Sol is much more capable.
today at 2:08 PM
How many of these "news" articles are we going to get?
This for me, isn't interesting, it required no skill, no imagination, in fact it seemed like it happened by dumb luck.
So we have entered an age where an army of know-nothings direct models to old forgotten tasks so they can get 15 minutes of un-deserved attention?
today at 2:22 PM
If human "skill" and "imagination" are your requirements for interesting, you're going to become permanently bored fairly soon I reckon.
today at 2:59 PM
> If human "skill" and "imagination" are your requirements for interesting, you're going to become permanently bored fairly soon I reckon.
What? Why? This has been my bar for my entire life, and I've never been bored for a single second.
today at 3:09 PM
Well at least the skill aspect will soon become so niche that essentially nobody will bother with the investment. So on reflection maybe not permanently, just mostly bored.
today at 3:09 PM
I doubt it. For âskillâ there are any number of sports; for âimaginationâ there are any number of stories and other mediums. Itâs not like every human has just decided to roll over and not do anything anymore; quite the contrary.
today at 2:27 PM
First time I'm seeing this. I had heard about the WWI ciphertext crack[1] but not this one, are you confusing the two?
[1] https://www.prinzai.com/p/gpt-6-astra-solves-a-wwi-german-ra...
today at 2:12 PM
This wasn't possible just months ago and for many who haven't been following closely this is still newsworthy, probably not for long, though.
today at 2:13 PM
yes and no. AI is great for patter-maching and finding solution by "assonance".
I agree with you that these are not "trilling" discovery but they can be worth something anyway.
Like you, I do not like this news also because I think they will be used to just "push" the next two IPOs (Anthropic, OpenAI).
today at 4:36 PM
> in fact it seemed like it happened by dumb luck.
At best, dumb brute force computation power.
It is about as meaningful as news that a computer found the 10....0th digit of Pi.
today at 2:09 PM
> This for me, isn't interesting, it required no skill, no imagination, in fact it seemed like it happened by dumb luck.
So like half of all useful human inventions are to you not interesting just because it happened by dumb luck?
today at 2:16 PM
Yea, it's kind of odd how "sour grapes" people can be when something stops being as special as they thought it was.
Take someone from a few hundred years ago and drop them into today, and if they don't go catatonic and die, then they'd tell you that we created magic. "Wow, you live in a world of magic and all you do is bitch about it".
>"You're flying! You're sitting in a chair, in the sky!"
today at 2:26 PM
Actuallllly these hypothetical people from a few hundred years ago hypothetically said you are an awful person for misrepresenting them, stop putting words in their mouth, thank you!
today at 2:18 PM
A person inventing something, even out of dumb luck, is interesting.
A machine running a loop through an expensive LLM for an undisclosed amount of time, which cost an undisclosed amount of money, which was told to keep looping into a solution was found, for a problem that nobody was very concerned about... That just seems like PR, and it's not so interesting.
today at 6:46 PM
To you.
today at 2:10 PM
Just reflects how much of modern "work" is just dumb shit that we need to be freed from.
today at 2:25 PM
The reason these are unsolved is because no-one was working on them.
today at 3:02 PM
So you're telling me that any problem a human starts working on gets solved simply because they are a human?
Lets stop and think about this, there is now a machine that can solve a bunch of problems that have not been solved simply because there wasn't enough people with knowledge to work on them, and all we have to do is supply power to get the answers?
Irrational hate causes one to be blind.
today at 3:16 PM
> So you're telling me that any problem a human starts working on gets solved simply because they are a human?
No? I donât think thatâs what theyâre saying at all.
> there is now a machine that can solve a bunch of problems that have not been solved simply because there wasn't enough people with knowledge to work on them
That âsimplyâ is doing a ton of work. A big reason there arenât enough people with knowledge to work on these problems is that their basic needs arenât met. If a slice of the money being poured into AI right now had been used to incentivise humans to work on these problems, maybe they wouldnât still be unsolved.
> and all we have to do is supply power to get the answers?
That is again, quite reductive. The harms caused by LLMs, both environmental and societal, are much larger than âjust supply powerâ.
> Irrational hate causes one to be blind.
Funny how itâs always the ones who disagree who are irrational and blind.
today at 3:42 PM
>If a slice of the money being poured into AI right now had been used to incentivise humans to work on these problems
There is no world in which this was ever going to happen or it already would have. Simply throwing out a counter-factual without explaining how any incentive for that path of reality to work means you can make any claim and tell others it's obviously true with no evidence.
>disagree who are irrational and blind
Incorrect. The dialectic is how progress is made. Getting mad and turning off your brain is a different story.
today at 4:55 PM
> There is no world in which this was ever going to happen
Thatâs the point. The incentive structure we have is bad. Thatâs the criticism.
> Simply throwing out a counter-factual without explaining how any incentive for that path of reality to work means you can make any claim and tell others it's obviously true with no evidence.
Again, youâre adding things to the argument which werenât said. There is as reason âhad beenâ was used.
today at 2:13 PM
Absolutely! Meetings about the emails and emails about the meetings!
today at 4:04 PM
UPD2. I threw the original question to gemini3.8 in antigravity. LLM oneshoted it in about 45min. The experiement with Opus is still running with checks.
The prompt was `Decrypt encrypted with enigma `ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC``
--
--
UPD. Lol. I pasted non-cyphered text
Qwen 3.7 max, gpt 5.6 sol, fable 5.1, gemini 3.8 flash decoded the message in one shot for me... There is nothing special about astra doing something here
I blantly threw request to decode the messaage in qwen 3.7. Used via api with couple simple generic system prompts like "be concise", nothing special. Prompted as
Decode
``` BTTE UM ANGABE DES MARSQWEGES X BEFINDE MIQ IN X ROSENOW ROSENOW X SOFORT FUNKANTWORT X WASCHBBSCH ```
--- response (I trunkated the output to conclusion only)
"BITTE UM ANGABE DES MARSCHWEGES. BEFINDE MICH IN ROSENOW. SOFORT FUNKANTWORT. [UNCLEAR/END]" Translation: "Please provide the marching route. I am located in Rosenow. Immediate radio response required. [Unclear]"
---
today at 4:10 PM
You are giving the already decoded message as input, itâs just short hand with one typo. Itâs hilarious that you might think that for 80 years no one was able to figure out that BTTE was supposed to be BITTE
today at 7:15 PM
I wasn't thinking, just mechanically moving _what I though is the encrypted string_ into the LLMs context.
I did another proper run and gemini 3.8 flash in antigravity solved it in about 45min https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49805363.
today at 4:11 PM
You pasted in the decoded German and asked it to "decode" into English?
today at 7:14 PM
Yeah. I wasn't _consious enough_ at the moment. Second attempt, though, succeeded https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49805363
today at 4:21 PM
I really, really would like to know what you were thinking when you pasted that "ciphertext" into the LLMs
today at 7:12 PM
I wasn't :D
today at 4:19 PM
[dead]
today at 2:12 PM
I wouldn't be surprised if humans cracked it then OpenAI "bought" the solution and work to claim it was GPT's doing
today at 2:17 PM
wild conspiracy given what else has come out of these companies.