Prior 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.
vb-8448yesterday at 10:18 PM
> 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.
redfloatplaneyesterday at 9:51 PM
A 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.
MisterMunchkinyesterday at 10:02 PM
We 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.
chr15myesterday at 11:46 PM
In 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)
elahiehyesterday at 10:22 PM
I 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_octettoday at 4:34 AM
I'm waiting for someone with enough tokens to ask 'Who is Satoshi?'
surgitoday at 7:05 AM
As 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.
ameliusyesterday at 10:29 PM
> The answer was simple in hindsight. It just kept looking until it found itāand that persistence might show up in many other areas.
Sounds more like brute forcing than intelligence, this time.
GranPCyesterday at 10:34 PM
I 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?
Retr0idyesterday at 9:49 PM
> I told it to look online at some of Fableās 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.
humbleharbingeryesterday at 9:51 PM
Putting all controversy aside - this is a refreshing use of a model.
Models are going to be a boon in the hands of historians.
layer8yesterday at 10:33 PM
One can wonder what Urquhart would have thought if he had learned who would be solving his cypher.
zkmontoday at 6:05 AM
Finding 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.
azinman2yesterday at 11:56 PM
Letās say it gets to the point that we reach superintelligence. All previous puzzles can be solved. But should they? Once you solve them, itās done. Whatās left? And whereās the fun and humanity?
The Olympics exist because we want to see human skill, even though jet planes exist.
vidarhtoday at 7:21 AM
The missing word in the second cryptogram quite obviously is meant to be Cromwell, and I'm a bit disappointed Fable didn't mention that and look for possible ways to resolve the error given that.
danamittoday at 1:45 AM
LLMs 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.
sumitkumartoday at 5:34 AM
This 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.
aogailiyesterday at 10:12 PM
It 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?
gdevenyiyesterday at 9:58 PM
Anyone pointed it at the Voynich manuscript?
johnnyApplePRNGyesterday at 11:23 PM
Definitely a much better target to show the power of an AI LLM imho (as opposed to stealing from starving mathematicians).
I wonder if people are getting it to help with Krypyos the final part? Great documentary on this codeā¦ https://youtu.be/jVpsLMCIB0Y
machomasteryesterday at 10:33 PM
I wonder, could current AI models solve the Zodiac killer code and how fast?
soks86today at 1:41 AM
This 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.
derektanktoday at 2:47 AM
So, 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 doesnāt understand the mathematics deeply, Iām getting kind of nervous that weāre going to wake up one day to find that the backbone of TLS has been shattered.
deletedtoday at 5:37 AM
matthovatoday at 1:16 AM
I 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 āa Christmas storyā where the kid decodes ābe sure to drink your ovaltineā
mvkeltoday at 1:53 AM
More 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.
Aboutplantsyesterday at 10:49 PM
Time to find out who Satoshi Nakamoto is
ChaoStatiXtoday at 2:18 AM
While 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.
sans_sousetoday at 1:40 AM
I 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_sousetoday at 1:39 AM
I 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..
levocardiatoday at 4:11 AM
>176k tokens
That's the most impressive part to me! That's barely one low-to-medium intensity session of front-end web-dev!
dangoodmanUTtoday at 2:24 AM
> Caveats, stated plainly:
Remember when they said it didn't sound like Claude anymore
JoshuaDavidtoday at 4:53 AM
"CONERTHTO" is just "CONVERTHTO" but missing a letter, no?
docheinestagestoday at 12:06 AM
It'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.
divs4realtoday at 4:17 AM
the 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
ramesh31yesterday at 9:52 PM
I 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.
KadirErturktoday at 4:20 AM
this is cool, but did you push more. like "this works but search if there is any other solution?"
marseysneedtoday at 12:21 AM
I wonder if the voynich manuscript is next.
FerritManstoday at 12:02 AM
they should throw this at the zodiac cipher
0pointsyesterday at 10:10 PM
AI made a zodiac-looking cipher for the headline image.
altern8yesterday at 10:37 PM
Still can't align my navbar buttons correctly
winterbourneyesterday at 11:54 PM
Nice! I'm waiting for the day when the remainder of the Maya codices are solved by AI.
deepsuntoday at 3:06 AM
When goes Collatz conjecture?
deletedyesterday at 10:07 PM
mondojesustoday at 5:09 AM
How 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?
plucyesterday at 10:09 PM
I'm surprised Anthropic didn't steal that announcement
jdjdjdjdjdyesterday at 11:37 PM
Don't forget to drink your Ovaltine.
m3kw9today at 1:32 AM
So it solved a obscure puzzle that looks like a weak decryption
The problem with Fable is the price for performance. Itās so expensive that I typically blow through my subscription usage of it within 1-2 days. With ChatGPT Astral, I can use it full blast for almost a week. Same with Opus.
spawrkstoday at 2:19 AM
Ok anyone else want to see Kryptos next? Am I the only one?
jdthediscipletoday at 5:28 AM
now on to the Zodiac ciphers?!
ckozlowskitoday at 1:53 AM
"setec astronomy...No more secrets."
justonenotetoday at 2:24 AM
Its 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.
yuvalkarmiyesterday at 10:03 PM
now THAT is cool!
taberiandyesterday at 10:21 PM
Anytime 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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kayamonyesterday at 11:18 PM
This 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.