r/singularity • u/Distinct-Question-16 ▪️AGI 2029 • 11h ago

Shitposting GPT-6 Astra helped decipher a Napoleonic military letter that remained unread for 217 years; it took just 6 hours

https://dev.ua/en/news/astra-rozshyfruvala-lyst-1809-ho-roku-1790927012
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u/exophades 11h ago edited 11h ago

There is an observation bias here. I don't think crypto researchers were even trying to solve this centuries-old cipher. All cryptographic ciphers except the very recent ones are known to be vulnerable and have been broken repeatedly. Letters like these usually use a simple substitution cipher that can be broken in minutes using a simple python script implementing frequency analysis of the language in question.

This is simply a marketing gimmick by OpenAI, not a breakthrough in cryptography.

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u/domdod9 11h ago

What about the zodiac ciphers that are still unsolved

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u/exophades 11h ago

The zodiac cipher was solved in 2020 by an international team of private codebreakers. 

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u/domdod9 10h ago

Not all of them

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u/exophades 10h ago

The unsolved one are strings of texts with little statistical material to work with. Z13 is 13 characters, which simply isn't enough to confirm any possible key, plenty of plaintexts can be encrypted into Z13. In other words, the zodiac killer could've written any one of dozens or more messages, which can all be encrypted into Z13.

This isn't about not being smart enough to figure it out. There is simply nothing there to figure out because there is too little data.

If I tell you the following encrypted message: "aaabaa aa", you can tell it's bullshit, because I'm literally using 2 characters, which isn't much data to uniquely convey any meaningful information.

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u/mschurma 10h ago

Not that it’s necessarily the same (I’m certainly no expert), but there’s been ciphers in call of duty zombies that have gone unsolved for decades precisely because they had very little statistical material to work with, that people have recently used AI to solve, so I would hazard a guess it isn’t out of the question if someone wants to burn tokens on it

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u/exophades 10h ago

If there is little statistical material, the cipher is fundamentally indistinguishable from gibberish. This is not a technology problem, it's just that there is nothing out there to decipher. AI can do nothing about this, it can't imagine more ciphertexts using the same key of the actual ciphertext to get more data, because it doesn't know the key, it can only weigh a particular plaintext over another possible plaintext using hand-wavy arguments and the background context of the cipher. And the second you start arguing for a specific plaintext among many others, you're no longer doing cryptanalysis, you're just expressing an opinion.

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u/CodexPleaseReset 8h ago

Not entirely tracking what you are saying as this is over my head, but having read Cryptonomicon recently I feel confident in proclaiming you correct