For anybody interested, the actual encrypted message:<p><pre><code> BTTE UM ANGABE DES MARSQWEGES X BEFINDE MIQ IN X ROSENOW ROSENOW X SOFORT FUNKANTWORT X WASCHBBSCH
</code></pre>
which, given misspellings, translates approximately to:<p><pre><code> Please specify the route of march. I am in Rosenow, Rosenow. Immediate reply by radio. Waschbusch.</code></pre>
<p><pre><code> I am in Rosenow, Rosenow.
</code></pre>
From the article:<p><pre><code> After trying many different approaches, GPT–6
Astra focused on using the repeated place name
ROSENOW ROSENOW as a crib.
</code></pre>
This feels extremely underexplained! Why would Astra think to use that as a "crib"? Was it common to repeat the place name in these messages?<p>(Is it possible that this is a misreported detail? It feels like a singular ROSENOW would be an equally effective crib)
This was explained in the article right there:<p>> it suspected that the plaintext of Nr. 173, SIPVX, might be related to the plaintext of the unbroken MVUEH message<p>It makes sense that Nr. 172 and Nr. 173 might be related since they were sent at around the same time.<p>In Nr. 173, "ROSENOW ROSENOW" was also present.<p>It also makes sense that a longer crib would generally be more effective than a shorter one.
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.<p>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")<p><pre><code> It also makes sense that a longer crib
would generally be more effective than a
shorter one.
</code></pre>
It would seem to me that the odds of looking for even a single ROSENOW in the decrypted message would be plenty. The odds of a single ROSENOW randomly occurring in incorrectly decrypted output are vanishingly small. So it seems to me that looking for ROSENOW is a safer bet vs. looking for ROSENOW ROSENOW -- a single ROSENOW is a great sign you've got the correct key, whereas looking for ROSENOW ROSENOW seems like it would deliver false negatives (think of all the times we say "New York" rather than "New York, New York")<p>I'm a novice at crypto though, so, maybe I've got that totally wrong.
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.<p>I ONLY know this because <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsBZOcqZerk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsBZOcqZerk</a>, btw.
Rosenow is a municipal (around 32km²) and in there is a district also called Rosenow. So the sender just specified his current position a bit more.
akin to "New York, New York" (as in NYC, NY)
Ah, thank you! That makes sense.
(X)
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.
Out of interest, what was the ciphertext?<p>Edit: Found it from here: <a href="https://mvueh-enigma-solved.carterl.chatgpt.site/" rel="nofollow">https://mvueh-enigma-solved.carterl.chatgpt.site/</a><p><pre><code> ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC</code></pre>
Do we have any kind of transcript as to <i>how</i> the message was cracked, and whether this was cheaper or more expensive than simply Bombe-style trying all the combinations?
The bombe method requires a crib of sufficient length
As the article states, the LLM built code for both an enigma simulator and a bombe simulator.<p>Breaking enigma is often about using lucky or educated guesses to heuristically reject large chunks of keyspace to leave the remaining keyspace computationally tractable.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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 <i>but not a large company</i> is a <i>clever thing to do</i> for the LLM.
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.)
> Unfortunately, this might be an example of OpenAI the company having vastly more compute time and effort than your average enigma nerd.<p>I don't think this applies, isn't this just the researcher using ChatGPT Codex on their machine?
> Unfortunately, this might be an example of OpenAI the company having vastly more compute time and effort than your average enigma nerd.<p>It seems like a lot of the recent "breakthroughs" come down to this: spending millions of dollars in compute to solve problems that essentially amount to recreational math problems
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.
Why wasn't this in the article?
That's crazy. Can someone share context of the message.
Slopped up site <a href="https://mvueh-enigma-solved.carterl.chatgpt.site/" rel="nofollow">https://mvueh-enigma-solved.carterl.chatgpt.site/</a> seems to indicate it's due to:<p><pre><code> 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.</code></pre>
was the misspellings deliberate?
A while ago I read Between Silk and Cyanide, the autobiography of one of the main actors of WW2 cryptographers, Leo Marks.
He had a whole unit working on 'indecipherables', too-hard-to-decrypt messages where the field-agents either misspelled words or misused the encryption keys. You can imagine how often agents misspelled, having to do all the encryption manually under great lots of stress.<p>(There's an interesting story on Operation North Pole, where Marks suspected that a Dutch resistance group had been overtaken by the SS, and it was actually the SS sending the encrypted messages: all the encryption and spelling was suddenly perfect)
Looks like Q is used as an abbreviation for CH
i would assume yes, to throw off decyphering. even more impressive that they managed to crack it
> i would assume yes, to throw off decyphering. even more impressive that they managed to crack it<p>Were operators of enigma machines aware enough of cryptology or the weaknesses of enigma, for that to have been done intentionally to prevent decryption? I doubt it, otherwise _many_ things should have been done _much_ differently by the operators.
I'm surprised "Bitte" --> "btte" was a hurdle. "Bitte," or "please," is ubiquitous in German. The more common the term, them more likely you'd be to see some contractions. Dropping the "i" is pretty logical- anyone looking at it would see immediately what it meant.
To be clear, the text in the comment is the plaintext, not the ciphertext. The plaintext is what's full of typos.<p>The ciphertext of message Nr 172 was:<p>MVUEH IDEVS ARMCC NQTAT
YEVFC DBZGG SMXWL PSYWZ
YTCBS WURRT BZCVG ODVJU
SLSOO MJQJZ SXSEB ZPEYM
DNXJF TC<p><a href="https://cryptocellar.org/bgac/g-army-july-1941.html" rel="nofollow">https://cryptocellar.org/bgac/g-army-july-1941.html</a>
The place is Rosenau actually.
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)<p>Prompt<p>Decrypt encrypted with enigma `ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC`<p>Result<p>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<p>(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).<p>3. Corrected German:
„Bitte um Angabe des Marschweges. Befinde mich in Rosenow, Rosenow. Sofort Funkantwort. Waschbusch.“<p>4. English Translation:
"Please specify the route of march. I am in Rosenow, Rosenow. Immediate reply by radio. Waschbusch."<p>Cryptographic Verification
Re-encrypting the plaintext using the identical key settings reproduces the exact ciphertext byte-for-byte:<p>Enigma
(
M
raw
)
=
ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC
Enigma(M
raw<p>)=ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC
19:10
How do you know it didn't just get the result from the web?<p>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.
UPD out of curiosity I ran the same prompt against gemini 3.8 flash via api with and withouth internet search.<p>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.<p>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.<p>When file output tool is enabled, some models give python script.<p>--<p>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.<p>--<p>The freshness of the news reduces changes that model fetched response from them
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?<p>(Or did it look up the results on the web?)
TLDR: it created program to decypher the string using opensource solutions related to enigma<p>--<p>it searched for enigma-related repos and implementations, fetched various github repos parts, build inline descryption program.<p>It ran bunch of various scrips like:<p>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<p>and<p>sed -n '1060,1130p' /Users/dp/.gemini/antigravity/brain/e9a54e5f-1325-448a-8d43-fc537b901f34/scratch/enigma.cc<p>and<p>Running 82M combination scan for unsteckered Enigma across all rotors, reflectors, positions, and ring settings. Monitoring progress.<p>and<p>Scanning all 60 rotor permutations and reflectors B and C across all ring settings (step 2) and all 17,576 indicator positions. Monitoring progress.<p>--<p>I also have opus running. It produced some sypher cracker which is still running (estimated time 100min, is about 15 min left)<p>--<p>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.
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I am not an SME and I oneshotted this in just 60 seconds by Googleing it.
I think this is a bit late for the war effort.
Neat, but "did it entirely on its own" is incongruous with "developing the necessary Python and C++ software for an Enigma simulator".<p>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?
It's a given now that LLMs are leveraging code to do things.<p>"On it's own" generally means "not steered" or otherwise given professional guidance or input.<p>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!"
Why does any of this matter? Llm is a memory of knowledge, of course it got what it got based on prior work.<p>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?
"I baked this cake on my own from scratch!"<p>"Oh?! You harvested and ground the wheat? You extracted the sugar? You laid the eggs?"
I took "on its own" to mean that it didn't need any additional prompting or guidance from the person sitting at the AI console. If so, then the originality of its work or the resources it used isn't the point. They're reporting that it did whatever it did without requiring supervision.
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.
>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?<p>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.<p>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.
Would you give much credit to someone who ignored a nearby hammer and pounded in a nail with his fist?
<i>Neat, but "did it entirely on its own" is incongruous with "developing the necessary Python and C++ software for an Enigma simulator".</i><p>Turing and Flowers: "How do you think <i>we</i> did it?"
This is a level of cope even I wouldn’t have thought reachable.
I mean, did it design the silicon? Mine the rare earths? Make an apple pie from scratch? No? Fraud.<p>Also you appear to be using a computer to submit this comment rather than doing it manually, so can it really be said that you wrote it?
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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.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsBZOcqZerk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsBZOcqZerk</a>
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.
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"<p>And then I come to hackernews and well, not quite, but I'm sure that one will be done shortly too.
Maybe both watched Tom Scott a month ago about Bletchley Park?
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDLbO9KeddY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDLbO9KeddY</a>
This is a much more interesting video than the Veritasium one IMO. I mean, if you don't already know anything about Enigma then, sure, the Veritasium one is decent. But it's been done so many times and who doesn't know it at this point? Somehow, though, I hadn't understood the scale of the operation at the Park and how it was kept secret that whole time. The bits about compartmentalisation of knowledge were particularly interesting.
The correct title: Researcher brakes one specific stubborn historic enigma message with good help from Astra.<p>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.<p>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 it’s getting a bit silly how much anrticles ignores the driving force (the person) in breakthroughs like this.
From TFA:<p>"However, the most astonishing thing about this break is that the GPT–6 Astra did it entirely on its own."
Follow up bit adds more context:<p>"Carter Leffer only directed GPT–6 Astra to see if it could break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page."
keep going<p>awesome! keep going<p>great work! keep going
/goal See if you can break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page.
> to me this shows the importance of human in the loop
Make me proud is current SOTA
Las Vegas Algorithm: A randomized, non-deterministic algorithm that is 100% accurate but has a variable runtime.
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
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.
> <i>I think the researchers who's harnessing the llm's power should be credited more than the model itself.</i><p>Even when the report literally says the LLM did it on its own?<p>Let's not over-correct in the direction of knowing better than the first party.
‘knowing what problems are worth solving —- priceless”.<p>For everything else, there’s Astracard
It also decided which problem to solve:<p>"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 ..."
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Why? Sounds like they played no role in solving it besides presenting the problem.
Even if this is true, we must avoid falling into the trap of Kasparov of betting on Centaur Chess.<p>Just like with Kasparov's Centaur Chess, the idea of a 'human in the loop' is just a necessity due to current limitations.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
Might be a bad analogy, because early chess computers were purely algorithmic and worked <i>despite</i> their poor board state evaluation heuristics that humans used to be able to augment.<p>Compare with go (boardgame): Centaur go was basically not <i>ever</i> a thing.<p>Other applications behaved kinda similarly (AI Starcraft/Dota/...), where we had decent "human-like" heuristics from the get go and the Centaur concept could never really shine, much less for a decade or more.<p>I'd also like to stress that past progress in this mainly happened for the love of the game, while the (economical) incentives to replace human office workers are... high.
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.
I'm still in my 20's so I feel some necessity to be future-oriented.<p>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).<p>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.
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.<p>One is humanist, the other is anti-human, (in the end goal at least).
> Why do you want machines to replace human intelligence and ability?<p>Where do you see the commenter say this?
> There will hopefully (?) come a time one day when human beings provide only ultimate value judgments, and everything else is done by machines.<p>In their previous grandparent post. They do reserve a place for human value judgement, but I doubt even that remains if everything else has been automated. The machines will decide what we value. We already see that to some degree with algorithmic engagement and targeted advertisements.
Seems like machines being able to replace human intelligence and ability will be a dystopia in the short term, but it’s the only route to a long-term utopia.
> This is a bit too future-oriented.<p>This? Still? After everything?<p>Buddy, you're living in the future. In a science fiction novel. Please get used to it.
If there is one thing I have realized after reading quite a few science fiction books, it is that I <i>don't</i> want to live in any one them - <i>not one</i>.<p>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.<p>And so, one must adapt.
.
> 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.<p>I find this suprising kinda. If I got a choice right now, there's a bunch of dystopian Scifi that I would instantly go for (out of sheer curiosity), e.g. the Murderbot universe.<p>Are there fantasy worlds that you <i>would</i> want to live in? I feel this is a bit of a suspect benchmark in the first place because books typically want some kind of tension/conflict which you won't get if everyone is just gratefully living their best life.
> Please get used to it.<p>The novel title: "Don’t Build The Torment Nexus".
It's good to think about where you're going, but you also have to keep track of where you are.<p>(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?")
> hopefully (?)<p>What you describe doesn't actually sound to me like the worthy goal it might initially come across as. Struggle helps us feel alive.
8 months ago I got to the top of highload.fun using GPT-5 and Opus 4.5, and a lot of human interaction.<p>Today, all it takes to get to the top 3 is "/goal get to the top of the leaderboard".<p>The human-in-the-loop is only a temporary measure until the models get good enough.
It seems I was wrong in this instance with regard to the "colab" part.<p>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.
> The correct title: Researcher brakes one specific stubborn historic enigma message with good help from Astra.<p>That's not correct for the content.<p>"However, the most astonishing thing about this break is that the GPT–6 Astra did it entirely on its own. Carter Leffer only directed GPT–6 Astra to see if it could break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page."
Your suggested title is more misleading, so what’s the value in using it?
*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.<p>Therefore Astra could also have done this comment better
that the left rotor turned over at 72 - was that a bug or a feature?
What's amazing is this comment is complete bullshit, and yet is #1.<p>Don't people actually read anymore?
Your "corrected" title is much less descriptive of what actually happened
also the entirety of the research that went into breaking enigma in the first place is in the training dataset
Come on, the trivializations start to sound quite unfounded now. Yes, a human was needed, but no, it wasn't a "collaboration"
So the LLM would have done all of this on its own? Why is it ok to acknowledge the human was needed but it’s not a collaboration? Is there a defined percentage of ownership required to make the word collaboration valid?
We focus on the tool because that is what makes it novel.<p>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.<p>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: <a href="https://digital.libraries.psu.edu/digital/collection/pabooknews/id/1054/" rel="nofollow">https://digital.libraries.psu.edu/digital/collection/pabookn...</a><p>It’s seems to me humans haven’t changed, just which machines we praise.
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?<p>Technically you built it yourself and the builder was just a minor collaborator?
From the article:<p>"However, the most astonishing thing about this break is that the GPT–6 Astra did it entirely on its own. Carter Leffer only directed GPT–6 Astra to see if it could break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page."<p>I mean... I'm all for collaboration but I think this case is pretty clear, no?
I mean, the LLM could do it even without all the HUMAN knowledge that was stealed during training about the Enigma machine?<p>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.
Humans are also needed to code in C++ and compile it, then the computer does the rest.<p>Now we just code in english and the computer does the rest.
What do you even mean it wasn't a collaboration. At any meaningful level LLMs just plain out suck when left unguided.<p>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.
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.
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.
Cyclist still chooses the time, mountain and direction the bicycle gets pushed in. Bicycles have no agency and only go down because gravity. Bicycle will not "discover" tree or wall, any outcome solely the result of cyclist's decisions even if thrown bicycles don't have generally deterministic paths. Don't anthropomorphize the bicycle.
The bicycle -- a simple method of transport powered entirely by humans -- used analogically to prove a point about [clears throat] automation.<p>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.
If generating an image doesn't make you an artist, generating a solution doesn't make you a researcher.
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.
Well, there goes my ego for ever thinking I could tackle that Enigma. GPT-6 just made it look trivial.
What's the connection between this message and 2005? It was published then?
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 Killer’s two remaining unsolved ciphers.
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.<p>The YouTube channel <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@doranchak/videos" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/@doranchak/videos</a> 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.
would really be incredible if it managed to pull the identity
now we're talking
Always wondered what the missing piece was for that 2005 Enigma challenge. Guess they just needed a few billion more parameters back then.
Funny how a problem from 2005 needed GPT-6. Makes you wonder about the dataset it trained on for that specifically.
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.
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.<p>I think the more accurate description of what's happening is that access to expertise is becoming commodified.
Only if you assume the value in humans is only in solving puzzles. That’s a very limited understanding of human beings
>That feels awful.<p>John Henry.<p>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.
> Even the Millennium Prize Problems have, in a way, become benchmarks for model companies to prove themselves<p>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".
And that underestimates how incredibly quickly humans become accustomed to new trends. If an LLM proves P≠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.
>If an LLM proves P≠NP in year, there is a high chance that few people will care anymore<p>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.<p>Also the problems LLMs are attacking are resulting in proofs that don't seem particularly enlightening, so that's unfortunate.<p>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 <i>fucking insane</i> over. Just <i>knowing</i> that would be meaningful on it's own, and give us limitless work to do, and puts lots of mathematicians in an awkward spot.<p>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!
> That feels awful<p>Only if you subscribe to the "humans are special" rhetoric, in which case I'm - maybe - sorry to say the feeling will only intensify.
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.
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?<p>Without the human intellect to emulate, LLMs would be nothing.
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).
There are many here who hate humans I think.<p>Prob because their life sucks.
"Boring": that's a straw man, it was never in my comment. I did say that people should stop grumbling and use the tool for good things. I'm not quite sure what was your point, but it sounded like you disagreed (one doesn't deploy the straw-man weapon otherwise), and this "Without the human intellect to emulate, LLMs would be nothing" sounds like an expression of grief, which admittedly is a very reasonable feeling for a number of reasons. What confuses me is that creating an intellect at the human level or above is indeed a great human achievement, but it's not a good thing because...? Maybe an emulation of the thing is not as good as the thing, was that your meaning?<p>Here, let me add my own little straw man: "if God didn't make us, how exactly did humans get so smart? Is not from a) being created in His image and b) being given His love? Without God, we would be mud from the ground (and a rib!)." If you agree with this statement, then, understandably, everything we have done since the Enlightenment has been to secure our place in hell, and LLMs are a particularly impertinent such device, but compared to a true human mind like a figurine of clay to a true person.<p>But, if of all things the measure is Man, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not, and Man keeps measuring the thing and the thing indeed seems very smart, then Man should stop moping and deal with the consequences of their actions: either ban the thing or use it for their own benefit.
No idea what you're on about. It is provable that humans developed LLMs, there is no proof that God created humans. It's possible that a human creation will someday be more capable and intelligent than humans on all fronts, but it still stands that without the foundation of human intellect, there would be no LLMs. So I don't understand people who act like "AI" is a separate species that came to exist independently and proves human inferiority, that humans need to accept that they're not special, and that we should rush to submit to our new AI overlords. If anything, the existence and capabilities of AI proves that human intellect is still impressive and versatile, because it is a direct reflection of human knowledge.
> Upvoted. I think that said humans should get used to the idea that their intellect is special only insofar as it was first<p>And used to build the LLMs of today. We'll see how that evolves once LLMs have to feed LLMs with their own "intellect".
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.<p>I agree with Frank Herbert's view of "thinking machines".
I genuinely don't understand how some people are so self-hating.
Oh yeah? How do you quantify it?
How many kilo-einsteins do we need to screw in the navier stokes lightbulb? Halting problem?
If that's the most awful thing that's going to happen here, then we're lucky.
> Intelligence has become a product you can quantify and buy with electricity.<p>There used to be days when women would make blankets, when men would make chairs, when children would make brooms...<p><i>But PROGRESS I tell you!</i>
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.<p>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...
Ants and bees are doing repetitive labor. Let's automate it and call it progress. Robot ants and robobees, thinking thoughts beyond your wildest AI dreams!
Preach it, brother!<p>Even old Ned Ludd won't buy my buggy whips, best in the land they may be.
Now that hammers are knocking in nails, I just don’t know what to do with my fists.<p>AI probably don’t dream of electric sheep but then again we don’t know. Perhaps we can find it out.<p>Perhaps AIs can figure out how to distribute wealth more fairly so that we can all dream of real sheep.<p>Intentionally philosophical PoV, what else is left for us monkies.<p>/s
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.<p>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.
But humans have been confusing pattern matching against known solutions for intelligence for a hundred years!<p>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.
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.
My favourite story is of an elderly coworker with no AI experience who innocuously asked GPT-5-mini (at the time his framework's default model) to translate a 50 page engineering spec, and it kept him at arm's length for about a week about how that task would take just another 24-36 hours more. He kept asking like, you finished yet? and it just made up excuses, "so sorry, I got distracted, give me one more day", and he went "please finish, I need this", and 5-mini came back "I totally understand -- let me get to work immediately, I'll report back ASAP", end of conversation. He got annoyed but never even suspected anything wrong, because this is the kind of conversation he's used to. I wonder how long this would have continued, if I hadn't intervened by chance.
> It estimated a human would take 6-10 weeks<p>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.
>mostly by pattern matching known solutions to similar puzzles, is not intelligence<p>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.<p>/snark<p>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.<p>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.
All technology on the tech tree which requires intelligence to unlock will soon be available to humanity – mind control, population exterminating bioweapons, new ultra destructive kinetic weaponry, perhaps even a cure for cancer.
Or maybe the smartest humans are the ones making AI and not the ones trying to solve Millenium problems by themselves.
Even those of us that are pro AI need to acknowledge this is the current reality.<p>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.
Breaking a 2005 Enigma? Probably just found the original key. Let's see it tackle something without pre-existing solutions.
Silly question: how do we know that the decrypted message is correct?<p>Isn’t it feasible that a given ciphertext could mean any number of different things under different settings? If so, we don’t know whether this setting happens to match a plausible plaintext or whether this really was the plaintext the sender intended to send.
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.<p>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.
"GPT–6 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?
As somebody who has spent a bit of time accessing archives both in real-life and online for history research, my natural reading of 'private collection' is privately-owned not private as in not-accessible to the public.
A private archive doesn't necessarily mean a non-public archive. Simplest reading is someone rehosted the files.
Coincidence that I saw the Veritasium Story about Enigma just yesterday?? Nice
I’m interested in what Astra’s test for german-language plaintext looks like. No doubt bog standard among cryptanalysts, but not intuitive for the rest of us. Otherwise it’s difficult to determine a goal state that ‘done’ looks like
So Astra plagiarized one of many open source Enigma simulators and Enigma Bombes and tried many cribs until the break.<p>Being trained on a mountain of stolen material for guessing cribs helps. Up to now no group had that much funding to steal. Congratulations.
I love that that the literal English translation of the German word for logistics leader "Nachschubfuerhrer" is "shove towards leader".
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.
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.<p>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.
Too bad Bletchley Park didn't have one back in the day.
Has there been any progress on undeciphered languages?
The training set is rather sparse for those.
I hope not, I'd hate for my enigmatic Linear-A tattoo to end up reading "Fish monger".
I would like to see an "AI" trained only up to knowledge through 1903<p>Then see if it can come up with E=mc^2
<a href="https://philpapers.org/archive/ZHARRI.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://philpapers.org/archive/ZHARRI.pdf</a>
whoa<p>a preprint just three weeks old with my question<p>what voodoo is this lol<p>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
Phew, never have I seen in my life the goalposts move so fast.<p>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.
Maybe we could try <i>not</i> assuming that people have the worst intentions in mind when they post here?
And they’re not allowed to use Lorenz, Riemann, Grossman, Mach, or any other prior art. Only then is it real.
So glad someone finally made "the goalpost comment", I was worried for a second that I wouldn't get to see it.
the idea is that it's math, so in theory it could be figured out by machine process<p>but was there enough knowledge by 1903 to truly figure that out?<p>or was it a leap in conscious realization that a machine could not emulate (yet)<p>(pretending to be a person is harder than math imho, much harder)
Yawn. Decode the Phaistos Disk. <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc&ved=2ahUKEwiEmLDHnIOXAxVNGlkFHQWjPPcQFnoECBQQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2kOcRbaV5iQAnfYXFpWtw4" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844...</a>
I'd be curious to see whether these models can create new forms of unbreakable encryption themselves!
Private key cryptography is essentially unbroken by these models.
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.
But they said new forms, I think that implied not the ones humans already discovered/designed
They seem to be better at solving concrete problems than designing new things (at least for now)
It's easier to evaluate certainly. Did it solve the problem? Yes/No<p>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.
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. That’s how they are able to solve some math problems, and how they are able to generate working code. Then it’s a question of how much you have to pay for the model to explore the space of solutions in a reasonable timeframe
They are only good at brute forcing stastically likely solutions.
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.<p>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?<p>But then... isn't <i>everything</i> latent in our training data if training data is "all observations made about the universe?"<p>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.<p>This gets interesting.<p>One of the things I love about AI is the glittering Pandora's box of philosophical questions it poses.<p>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 <i>intelligence and consciousness are unrelated phenomena</i>. 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.<p>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.<p>I <i>suspect</i> (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.
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.<p>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.
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 there’s absolutely no reason why AI can’t learn to do that too.
Careful what you wish for. The swarm will probably use it to communicate.
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?<p>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?
Hopefully someone will now be able to solve the fourth section of Kryptos <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos</a>
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?
Your comment implies that this is all that they're working on, which does not seem substantiated.
It seems like OpenAI's takeaway after Sora is to not stretch themselves thin and focus on what's important.<p>Based on what's publically available, they're focusing on hacking uncontesting orgs using misconfigured sandboxes and math puzzles.<p>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.
No it signals that they can do few things very well. And among those few things are those math puzzles.<p>I think they should now focus on robotics, so it can do my dishes while I work on fun math games.
>I think they should now focus on robotics<p>why would they compete with Nvidia on that?
We already have dish washers bud.<p>There’s 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.<p>There’s already a lot of fake jobs and output of zero value - nobody bats an eyelid.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nothing in TFA seems to imply that this was solved by OpenAI. This looks like an independant researcher.
Correct.<p>There are many things I want to do - that would require me to hire a team of 50 people.<p>I don’t want to do that nor can I afford to. Can OAI focus on enabling me to do this? I don’t care about this other stuff.<p>Just like many things in life - if it doesn’t show up in the economy it’s irrelevant.
Consider that their internal use of AI is likely pretty math and science heavy.<p>I think the publicity is a nice to have. They need models like this for in-house use.<p>Technically, this isn’t OpenAI directly.
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.
well, you could say that for plenty of academic research but their value is usually not obvious at the start.
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.
Am I the only one frustrated the actual message isn't in the article????
Still waiting for Linear A
I didn't know this - from wikipedia page on Enigma[1]:<p>> 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.<p>Ok interesting, so why do people talk about Turing in this connection then?<p>> 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<p>Ok so Turing just improved an existing method. Without being an actual expert it's impossible to know how much credit he actually deserves.<p>Two more references: the Polish method was called "Bomba" [3] invented by Marian Rejewski [4]<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing</a><p>[3] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_(cryptography)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_(cryptography)</a><p>[4] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski</a>
Related:<p><i>GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipher</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49763987">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49763987</a>
Cryptographers are much better behaved than mathematicians about these solutions
I want to know more about the “private collection” 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.
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.<p>The prompt was `Decrypt encrypted with enigma `ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC``<p>--<p>--<p>UPD. Lol. I pasted non-cyphered text<p>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<p>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<p>Decode<p>```
BTTE UM ANGABE DES MARSQWEGES X BEFINDE MIQ IN X ROSENOW ROSENOW X SOFORT FUNKANTWORT X WASCHBBSCH
```<p>--- response (I trunkated the output to conclusion only)<p>"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]"<p>---
You are giving the already decoded message as input, it’s just short hand with one typo. It’s hilarious that you might think that for 80 years no one was able to figure out that BTTE was supposed to be BITTE
I wasn't thinking, just mechanically moving _what I though is the encrypted string_ into the LLMs context.<p>I did another proper run and gemini 3.8 flash in antigravity solved it in about 45min <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49805363">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49805363</a>.
Try this:
JCRSAJTGSJEYEXYKKZZSHVUOCTRFRCRPFVYPLKPPLGRHVVBBTBRSXSWXGGTYTVKQNGSCHVGF
You pasted in the decoded German and asked it to "decode" into English?
Yeah. I wasn't _consious enough_ at the moment. Second attempt, though, succeeded <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49805363">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49805363</a>
I really, really would like to know what you were thinking when you pasted that "ciphertext" into the LLMs
[dead]
So what is this? Esoteric cypher that no one has seriously tried to break or a new tier of frontier ability?
"Esoteric cypher that no one has seriously tried to break" lol<p>It's military comms traffic from WW2, encrypted by machine named Enigma. Back in 1940's it was like breaking SSL today, with only difference that they actually could (kinda) break Enigma.
Turing would be so proud.
How about Voynich manuscript
they solve all these math problems by stealing people prompts
Now that's passing the Turing test for real.
How many of these "news" articles are we going to get?<p>This for me, isn't interesting, it required no skill, no imagination, in fact it seemed like it happened by dumb luck.<p>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?
If human "skill" and "imagination" are your requirements for interesting, you're going to become permanently bored fairly soon I reckon.
> If human "skill" and "imagination" are your requirements for interesting, you're going to become permanently bored fairly soon I reckon.<p>What? Why? This has been my bar for my entire life, and I've never been bored for a single second.
I doubt it. For “skill” there are any number of sports; for “imagination” there are any number of stories and other mediums. It’s not like every human has just decided to roll over and not do anything anymore; quite the contrary.
First time I'm seeing this. I had heard about the WWI ciphertext crack[1] but not this one, are you confusing the two?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.prinzai.com/p/gpt-6-astra-solves-a-wwi-german-radio" rel="nofollow">https://www.prinzai.com/p/gpt-6-astra-solves-a-wwi-german-ra...</a>
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.
yes and no.
AI is great for patter-maching and finding solution by "assonance".<p>I agree with you that these are not "trilling" discovery but they can be worth something anyway.<p>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).
> in fact it seemed like it happened by dumb luck.<p>At best, dumb brute force computation power.<p>It is about as meaningful as news that a computer found the 10....0th digit of Pi.
Just reflects how much of modern "work" is just dumb shit that we need to be freed from.
> This for me, isn't interesting, it required no skill, no imagination, in fact it seemed like it happened by dumb luck.<p>So like half of all useful human inventions are to you not interesting just because it happened by dumb luck?
Yea, it's kind of odd how "sour grapes" people can be when something stops being as special as they thought it was.<p>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".<p>>"You're flying! You're sitting in a chair, in the sky!"
A person inventing something, even out of dumb luck, is interesting.<p>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.
congrats to Alex Shovkoplyas, that in 2017 broke another unbroken message from this day.
Can we get it to solve the Zodiac cyphers?
This is still just stochastic parroting. I'm still in denial.
So OpenAI and anthropoc business model it seems like this:<p>-hype or fear monger<p>-release the scary all-knowing model<p>-milk subscriptions and api in the first two months or so<p>-nerf the said scary model and use the excess compute and money acquired in an “internal model”<p>-internal model make hype or fear monger<p>-repeat
"They are trying to generate hype before the IPO so that they can cash in before the bubble bursts"
Maybe I'm wrong - but it seems like some strange form of competitiveness.<p>They don't care about the advancements themselves, only that the advancements are some sort of cheating that shouldn't "count".<p>Humanity is profoundly unsettled by AI and is responding with avoidance and denial.
I think it was Roon who said it months ago: "Too many people are not emotionally prepared for if it's not a bubble."
Like killing all of humanity? Agreed, we're not prepared for that.
the opposite is also true
It can be AGI and still be a bubble?<p>The internet was pretty important afterall even with a bubble.
Shh. Some people aren’t capable of understanding nuance.
Yes, a huge range of possibilities exist. Including that the valuations are exactly accurate, or even too low.<p>I think the quote above is best as written, with a big emphasis on the "if"
Nobody is prepared if it's not a bubble.
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.<p>It’s another dot com bubble, not a crypto bubble. Trillion dollar valuations burst once you leave lesswrong.<p>Edit: very fancy autocomplete. I know what these things are capable of. It’s still not “intelligence”, 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 it’s clearly still that.
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.
The "auto-complete" thing is a false framing.<p>Complete this sentence: "You can solve world hunger by..."<p>Intelligence is required to finish sentences. It's not just a Markov chain.
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.<p>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.
Fair point. In that case, it’s imperative you share this* with your local representative: <a href="https://chatgpt.com/share/6ab29440-6944-83ea-853f-8060dc58daf5" rel="nofollow">https://chatgpt.com/share/6ab29440-6944-83ea-853f-8060dc58da...</a><p>*This un actionable summary of existing discourse. The real world doesn’t produce traces or take HTTP requests.
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Breaking a 2005-era Enigma challenge is seriously impressive. Wonder what unique constraints Astra navigated.
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Could everyone who seriously thought AI was a stochastic parrot and said AI would go nowhere and talked as if you knew everything... could you admit your just wrong, and apologize for acting like you were an expert in something you never understood. This is likely about 50% of HN. I forgive you all, it's ok.
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.<p>Is ClosedAI running out of money or what is going on?
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.<p>5.6 Sol is much more capable.
I wouldn't be surprised if humans cracked it then OpenAI "bought" the solution and work to claim it was GPT's doing