Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher (vals.ai)

I have not seen this in other models.

Modern AIs have very limited metaknowledge - they don't know exactly where the limits of their capabilities lie. So you can get things like "a task is doable for an AI, but the AI thinks it's impossible, so it doesn't try hard enough".

Usually you get the opposite - AI overconfidently trying at tasks it has no conceivable way of reliably solving, falling far short, and failing to self-check, fail gracefully and self-report the task as failed. But having piss poor metaknowledge cuts both ways!

So you can, in fact, get better performance sometimes by applying some variant of "assume this problem is solvable" or "other problems like this were already solved by AIs" pep talk. Not always, far from it, but it does happen on the occasion with frontier capabilities.

AI, being the super hungry energy monster it is right now, in my view accelerates this trend not reverses it. Even with renewables the need for reliable, stable power in a dense form (data centres use A LOT of power per sqm) means lots of land clearing, energy for construction, cooling/pumping, chip manufacturing and other uses. All want stable quick to deploy power due to the AI race (e.g. fossil fuels).

> The run baseline was captured without a physical MAC; the current device is not durably bound to it.

> Engineering mode confirmation is the ESPHome component read-back; the LD2410 UART acknowledgement is not observed, so this is not proof the radar itself applied the sensitivity change.

No clue what the fuck any of it means.

That does not mean that specific instances of it are still very interesting though. This article is the "I had claude vibecode a thermostat for my bathtub" of cryptography.

* And in this case I'm not sure it even meets that bar. For all we know a couple readers back when the book released had a delightful afternoon with it, solved the riddle, then forgot about it.

For Earth, the proof presented for NS is just our first attempt navigating from our previously known facts to the proof.

I expect we will be able to shorten it dramatically (most likely with human and AI insights), but I don't think we should read too much into the length. If you want a similar point of comparison, see the original proof (by humans) of Fermat's last theorem. It has been shortened significantly. This is normal.

because they're not intelligent in the sense you're hinting at (conceptual integrity or generalization) but they are as the name suggests, large. Like comparing a forklift to a human. It's easier to bulldoze through a lot of things than tie your shoes.

If we weren't quite as impoverished conceptually and still had the vocabulary of the Catholics we'd recognize this as ratio (discursive knowledge) vs Intellectus (apprehending knowledge)

Also, that section is vague and doesn't explain the actual methodology.

This cipher context "rhymes" well with Kryptos K4 in many ways.

The definition of solving a cipher must be something like getting a highly meaningful result (like intelligible natural language text) by applying a process with relatively low Kolmogorov complexity relative to the length of the output. If you don't have a constraint like that, it could literally be meaningless what should count as a solution. For example, a cipher that was encrypted under a one-time pad can be successfully decoded to any plaintext just by choosing the appropriate key; there's no reason to prefer any plaintext over any other unless you have external knowledge that constrains the plaintext and/or the key. (That's what it means for the one-time pad to be information-theoretically secure, which is the lack of a constraint that helps distinguish a "good" solution from a "bad" solution.)

Basically you could say that every cipher is a transformation of a plaintext with some kind of computer program. (The human who invented the cipher may not have thought of it as a computer program, perhaps because computers hadn't even been invented yet, but there should be an equivalent program to the encipherment and decipherment process.) A good solution in that Kolmogorov complexity sense is like "a short program produced a meaningful decryption". There are statistical methods to recognize some kinds of plaintext, and there are statistical methods to recognize properties of specific ciphers (for example, to guess the most likely length of a Vigenère key), but it doesn't seem that this can inherently generalize across "all possible programs".

But if you want to limit the family of ciphers to specific things like Vigenère or Playfair or something, then yes, there are good statistical tests. It's just that it creates a higher-order question of how much flexibility the cipher creator could have had to choose a cipher method, conceivably including one that isn't attested anywhere, or one that has more good security properties of some kind than other classical ciphers did.

It seems like this will intersect with historical research, like "well, I don't think that so-and-so was actually sophisticated enough to literally create an interesting new kind of cipher from scratch, so therefore if this is a real message, it's probably one of these methods that would have been known in that cultural environment at that time and place", which maybe is enough of a constraint to have decent statistical tests. But we still have some idiosyncratic things like the Voynich Manuscript where experts have been fighting for decades over the baseline question of whether it's actually an enciphered human language plaintext!

The worst case problem is not even an error in encipherment but the idea that the apparent ciphertext could literally be random (chosen by throwing dice or spinning a wheel or drawing letter tiles or something), so there's no form of meaningful decipherment possible by any means, even with the original creator's knowledge.

    Pygmalion panderer

I have a plug-in to do this. I don't know if it's effective but Claude said it was genuinely helpful (obviously would say that about anything)

Initials match too ;)

Hmm, this guy is going to be woken up in a few decades, either one of the richest people in the world or one of most disappointed.