Nördnytt! 🤓Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
- nerevarthelame - 8152 sekunder sedanPrior to the "Elicitation" section, you'd think this article was written by a cryptographer or baroque historian who had been trying to solve this particular puzzle for years - failing embarrassingly until they presented the problem to Claude. However, as far as I can tell (I too am not a baroque historian), there isn't much reason to think this cipher was well-known or studied.
But as they do eventually explain, the LLM's task wasn't solely to solve this specific problem, it was to first identify an unsolved problem it could solve. That's potentially more impressive and difficult than solving the unremarkable cipher itself.
- surgi - 188 sekunder sedanAs someone who frequents online and offline scavenger hunts and CTFs, I second the opinions around here that the task at hand must have been largely unknown. As I find it hard to believe no one from the entire scav hunt / CTF communities would try to fit a classic book cipher interpretation. Tells me more about the state of the art of those academic circles that failed to decipher this than about LLMs.
- vb-8448 - 31815 sekunder sedan> Historically, many of these problems were bottlenecked by human attention. Someone had to care enough to spend hours or days reading obscure material, testing unpromising ideas, tracing references, and trying things that might go nowhere
I wonder how many of the recent results are due to the fact that very few looked at the problem to start with. Still great results, but the general impression is that it's more about the so many low-hanging fruits than the actual capability.
- redfloatplane - 33413 sekunder sedanA very neat problem and result. I often find myself swinging between "It's so over" and "We're so back" - some days I roll out of bed thinking I could have Claude solve some random unproven OEIS sequence before breakfast; other days, I wake up in a cold sweat worried about the fate of humanity and what the world might look like in a decade. I think it's that I don't have a very high p(doom) or p(utopia), and I don't really have any solid conviction on how this whole thing is going to go, so my vibe-o-meter jitters between 'fine' and 'not fine' constantly. It's just such an unpredictable moment. Anyways: really neat to see this use case. I myself recently used Claude to finally do an relatively exhaustive study of the location of heretofore-unlisted formal gardens in Ireland in the early 1800s and early 1900s, by having Claude write the tooling for me to manually annotate a few dozen on tiles of historic maps, and then running some CV model across the rest of the tiles using my input. I'd been planning to do this project for over a decade, but I could never find the time (or the enthusiasm) to learn all the details of how to do it myself. It took me a weekend with Claude and continues to bring me joy.
> Caveats, stated plainly. [from the Fable transcript pasted in the article]
I had a visceral reaction to these three words.
- MisterMunchkin - 32741 sekunder sedanWe found a cipher my dad had written as a child with no obvious key or anything. Chatgpt was able to crack it in 20 minutes and figure out the message, and we knew it was right because it mentioned names of children he went to school with.
- chr15m - 26523 sekunder sedanIn some ways this is similar to those game demos people get the LLMs to build. When you say "build me a cool cyberpunk FPS" you get the FPS it can build, not the FPS the author wanted, or the FPS that is desired by players. It looks impressive but that doesn't make it a good game, or the game anybody actually asked for. It's demo porn.
In the same way if you tell an LLM to go and find an unsolved cipher it can solve, of course it finds the one it can solve out of the set of all possible ciphers. Of course it finds one that uses a one time pad that is public and referenced nearby in the text.
It's the same trick used by those people who film themselves throwing a basketball backwards into the hoop. You do it enough times and don't show the misses. You pick the best one to show. It makes it look like you're a basketball genius when you aren't.
It is of course, still a cool trick. Those videos are fun to watch, and so is an LLM solving a cipher. It is absolutely incredible to live in the timeline where you can tell a computer in plain language to go and find a puzzle on the internet and solve it, and it does exactly that. It's truly a mind boggling miracle.
The first principle is that we must not fool ourself, and ourselves are the easiest people to fool. (Ht Feynman)
- elahieh - 31559 sekunder sedanI presume what the author did was plug Klaus Schmeh's top 50 unsolved ciphers at https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/the-top-50-un... into Fable 5.1 and ask Fable 5.1 to have a go. On this kind of problem it always falls back to Opus 5 anyway so I save time by starting with Opus.
The successor to Klaus's blog is Satoshi Tomokiyo's Cryptiana site, so a month ago I asked Opus 5 to scrape it all, rank them and have a go at solving some. It didn't get the ranking right. But I knew the Civil War Stager ciphers were ripe for solving, so I had it do those https://cryptiana.blogspot.com/2026/09/route-transposition-c...
The art of solving historical unsolved ciphers is knowing what is on the boundary of solvability. Since this site attracts so many OpenAI and Anthropic employees, I'll mention one that was featured by both Klaus and Satoshi in 2023, presumably Spanish transposition, which should be on that boundary but has resisted all attempts at solution https://cryptiana.blogspot.com/2023/09/a-telegram-from-switz...
- angry_octet - 9212 sekunder sedanI'm waiting for someone with enough tokens to ask 'Who is Satoshi?'
- amelius - 31132 sekunder sedan> The answer was simple in hindsight. It just kept looking until it found it—and that persistence might show up in many other areas.
Sounds more like brute forcing than intelligence, this time.
- Retr0id - 33537 sekunder sedan> I told it to look online at some of Fable’s strongest feats, especially the math problems it has solved, and that something like this should be easy in comparison.
Fascinating. I wonder if you could show "fake news" to a weaker model and get it to be more ambitious in its attempted solutions, even if it's not fundamentally any smarter.
- GranPC - 30813 sekunder sedanI am trying very hard to find an original version of this cipher with no luck. It almost sounds like this whole thing is a hallucination...? Can anyone point me to a PDF of the original Cyphral Distich as printed?
- zkmon - 3741 sekunder sedanFinding patterns and information using machines, in a seemingly random noise should no longer be a surpise, much the same way as lifting tonnes of weight using a crane is no longer a surprise.
- humbleharbinger - 33380 sekunder sedanPutting all controversy aside - this is a refreshing use of a model. Models are going to be a boon in the hands of historians.
- layer8 - 30909 sekunder sedanOne can wonder what Urquhart would have thought if he had learned who would be solving his cypher.
- azinman2 - 25883 sekunder sedanLet’s say it gets to the point that we reach superintelligence. All previous puzzles can be solved. But should they? Once you solve them, it’s done. What’s left? And where’s the fun and humanity?
The Olympics exist because we want to see human skill, even though jet planes exist.
- sumitkumar - 5601 sekunder sedanThis seems a lot like fishing. Cast a wide net with claude to find and solve an 'unsolved' problem. Given this, it is not enough to verify the problem and the solution but also the history of the problem and if it really existed or has simply been collectively hallucinated.
This is impressive as it is optimizing the effort on the low, but not too low hanging fruit.
- danamit - 19366 sekunder sedanLLMs feel to me like the monkeys from the infinite monkey theorem, except that they are on the finite side. It writes gibberish for me, and for others it writes Shakespeare.
Obviously this is just survivorship bias/p-hacking/insert-other-buzzword but can't help but anthropomorphize it, it is hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that the same person who cannot produce code without 2 unrelated bugs both not present does this for someone else.
Imagine a math teacher struggling to understand what he is teaching casually solving a millennium problem, then go back to not understanding what he is teaching, doesn't happen in our world.
I am not confused by any of this, I am just trying to communicate an idea.
- aogaili - 32124 sekunder sedanIt is cool. But how do we know that nobody solved that problem before and it was somewhere in the training data? some blog, or some book or whatever?
- wise_blood - 3694 sekunder sedan
- gdevenyi - 32979 sekunder sedanAnyone pointed it at the Voynich manuscript?
- johnnyApplePRNG - 27888 sekunder sedanDefinitely a much better target to show the power of an AI LLM imho (as opposed to stealing from starving mathematicians).
- machomaster - 30858 sekunder sedanI wonder, could current AI models solve the Zodiac killer code and how fast?
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- derektank - 15632 sekunder sedanSo, does anyone have any intuition for how concerned we should be that one of leading foundation models will be able to successfully attack the gold standard symmetric and public key encryption algorithms (AES, ChaCha, ECDH, Kyber, etc.) in the next few years? As a consumer of crypto that doesn’t understand the mathematics deeply, I’m getting kind of nervous that we’re going to wake up one day to find that the backbone of TLS has been shattered.
- soks86 - 19623 sekunder sedanThis appears to be proof that the guy who wrote the cipher, Sir Thomas Urquhart, did in fact laugh himself to death as legend has it.
He wrote the cipher, and then, upon hearing Charles II was Restored to the throne he laughed until he died. The cipher reads, "O GOD UPHOLD KING CHARLES THE SECOND AND MAKE HIM THE SUPREME RULER OF THIS LAND" and so he was laughing because he just made an excellent joke that he can't tell anyone about until someone figures it out.
Someone needs to add this to Wikipedia. It will be necessary to first convince an academic to make the claim so there's a reasonable citation.
Oh, and haha. It was a nice one, Thomas.
- matthova - 21115 sekunder sedanI know this is a feat of AI engineering, but given the end result all I can think of when reading this is the scene from “a Christmas story“ where the kid decodes “be sure to drink your ovaltine”
- mvkel - 18857 sekunder sedanMore proof that it's not that a human -can't- do it, it's just that no human would dedicate their entire lifetime to solving this niche challenge.
- Aboutplants - 29945 sekunder sedanTime to find out who Satoshi Nakamoto is
- ChaoStatiX - 17363 sekunder sedanWhile it is deeply encouraging to see AI helping humanity solve complex puzzles, it won't be long before AI becomes advanced enough to produce proofs where we know the answers are correct, but can no longer fully comprehend the reasoning and principles behind them.
- andy_ppp - 32397 sekunder sedanI wonder if people are getting it to help with Krypyos the final part? Great documentary on this code… https://youtu.be/jVpsLMCIB0Y
- levocardia - 10619 sekunder sedan>176k tokens
That's the most impressive part to me! That's barely one low-to-medium intensity session of front-end web-dev!
- JoshuaDavid - 8102 sekunder sedan"CONERTHTO" is just "CONVERTHTO" but missing a letter, no?
- sans_souse - 19694 sekunder sedanI feel like I've been camped in the wikipedia "Unsolved Cryptographic Cyphers" for at least 5 years, one of my go-to checks for when looking for interesting historical articles on the subject. I'm surprised I've not heard of this one until now..
- sans_souse - 19734 sekunder sedanI feel like I've been camped in the wikipedia "Unsolved Cryptographic Cyphers" for at least 5 years, one of my go-to checks for when looking for interestic historical articles on the subject. I'm surprised I've not heard of this one until now..
- skeledrew - 26306 sekunder sedanQuite intuitive. Let's heart those "just a next token predictor" cries now.
- divs4real - 10255 sekunder sedanthe human trait of giving up doesn't exist in fable yet, it just kept looking and looking until it conjured it, analyzing patterns, multiples at the same time
- docheinestages - 25290 sekunder sedanIt's hard to believe that a model can nowadays solve mathematical challenges and break ciphers, yet it fails to do trivial tasks involving critical thinking, having taste, and not just running around in circles.
- KadirErturk - 10059 sekunder sedanthis is cool, but did you push more. like "this works but search if there is any other solution?"
- dangoodmanUT - 16997 sekunder sedan> Caveats, stated plainly:
Remember when they said it didn't sound like Claude anymore
- marseysneed - 24388 sekunder sedanI wonder if the voynich manuscript is next.
- FerritMans - 25569 sekunder sedanthey should throw this at the zodiac cipher
- 0points - 32272 sekunder sedanAI made a zodiac-looking cipher for the headline image.
- altern8 - 30634 sekunder sedanStill can't align my navbar buttons correctly
- winterbourne - 26017 sekunder sedanNice! I'm waiting for the day when the remainder of the Maya codices are solved by AI.
- ramesh31 - 33370 sekunder sedanI was watching Shatner's "Unexplained" the other day on this topic, and it hit me; there are mountains of these old mysteries out there that could be solved in an afternoon now with frontier LLMs as soon as anyone took the time to bother. Exciting times.
- deepsun - 14485 sekunder sedanWhen goes Collatz conjecture?
- mondojesus - 7109 sekunder sedanHow are these models being used to solve all these problems. Is it just "please solve this problem", "keep trying" repeatedly in a loop, or is there are more grounded workflow?
- kayamon - 28163 sekunder sedanThis is insane; I've never heard of this problem before in my life, and even just reading the post for one minute I immediately thought "hey, maybe the numbers refer to something in the text?" And hey yeah, they do.
This cannot be real. This website is ill.
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- pluc - 32349 sekunder sedanI'm surprised Anthropic didn't steal that announcement
- xyst - 9727 sekunder sedanCool. Decode this in your LLM:
--. --- / ..-. ..- -.-. -.- / -.-- --- ..- .-. ... . .-.. ..-.
- jdjdjdjdjd - 27048 sekunder sedanDon't forget to drink your Ovaltine.
- TheSpacerr - 6794 sekunder sedanhow?
- Jun8 - 32245 sekunder sedanNext up: Kryptos part 4 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos)
- chaostheory - 18656 sekunder sedan[delayed]
- m3kw9 - 20154 sekunder sedanSo it solved a obscure puzzle that looks like a weak decryption
- spawrks - 17336 sekunder sedanOk anyone else want to see Kryptos next? Am I the only one?
- jdthedisciple - 6000 sekunder sedannow on to the Zodiac ciphers?!
- ckozlowski - 18879 sekunder sedan"setec astronomy...No more secrets."
- justonenote - 17006 sekunder sedanIts all brute force. This was how the pyramids were built too. Verifiable goal and a lot of energy expended aiming toward it. It wasn't aliens then and its not super intelligence now.
All of these breakthroughs are in verifiable brute force domains, and some of them are probably wrong because of a typo in a lean specification or just a base level axiom being incomplete.
I think the better the way to think about LLMs is like they are new substances, like when we first discovered clay or bronze, but confined to the digital realm. Previously we were chipping away at stones trying to make to things as close to useful as possible, then we found a step change. LLMs are like clay but they have their limitations. Wake me up when they are proposing new, { conjecture: interesting|useful|new } and not as a side effect of trying to get to a goal.
- yuvalkarmi - 32671 sekunder sedannow THAT is cool!
- taberiand - 31596 sekunder sedanAnytime I get worried about where AI might be headed, I think about how Climate Change is now on its way like an out of control freight train headed straight for us, and I worry about AI a little less. I doubt it's going to do anything to us that we're not already doing to ourselves
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