WWI cipher solve claim spreads further on Hacker News
5 Sep 18 2:59 AM · 9d ago · 5 articles · 12 posts · 38 comments · 6 sources · development 5 of 5
A second Hacker News submission points back to the same X post announcing the 1918 ADFGVX decryption, extending discussion of the claim.
Carter Leffen Product development coach, Bloomberg LPGPT-6 Astra OpenAI AI modelOpenAI Developer of GPT-6 Astragwintrob (PrinzAI blog) Author of the WWI cipher case study@deredleritt3r Poster who announced the WWI cipher decryption on X
The whole story articlespostscomments the bright band is this development · numbered dots are the others · click one to jump
Reported in the same hours no headline names this development itself — these 3 claims were published in its stretch
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first by HN Best, 8d ago · also RuntimeWire, prinz, HN Frontpage
2 more headlines
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3 outlets GPT-6 Astra Breaks an Old Enigma Message
first by Schneier, 5d ago · also HN Best, HN Frontpage
1 more headline
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first by Tom's Hardware, 8d ago
1 more headline
- ChatGPT-6 Astra cracks 108-year-old unsolved WWI German code for the first time … Tom's Hardware · 6d ago
What people said 24 voices · best of 77 · verbatim
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This article would be a lot more interesting if it included the prompts, transcript, and generated code from the session with the LLM.
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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)PromptDecrypt encrypted with enigma `ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC`ResultRaw Decryption (verbatim from the machine)…
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GPT-6 Astra cracked a previously unsolved 1941 German Army Enigma message from World War I So GPT-6 had to figure out the right key, reconstructing the ADFGVX transposition, and recognizing a plausible plaintext from only 170 ciphertext symbols. Astra autonomously: > Searched historical archives ...
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But in this case its not important nor busywork, the key was already there. It's like they're standing on a ladder and dropping a basketball through the hoop, then bragging about how they got it in. And also claiming they built the ladder when someone else did.
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It is irresponsible to misattribute these accomplishments to the AI agents. Every time, at least one person is involved in prompting and guiding the process. The headlines should be "[human] solves [challenge] using [tool]." The article author's use of anthropomorphizing phrases like "Astra's hypothesis for" and "Astra felt compelled" do not leave…
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Mildly interesting anecdote: when the Cyphral Distich solution popped up a few days ago, I spent about an hour with ChatGPT trying to solve it myself without looking at the proposed solution. ChatGPT opened by saying “the solution is disputed online,” and made the dispute sound fairly convincing, which struck me as odd because things like this are…
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I don't get this type of comment. I like old ciphers and while I would probably enjoy reading about it more if it had been a (team of) people, I still think it's interesting to read about. I've so far refused to use LLMs for anything generative, still write code by hand, and am terrified of what lies ahead. But I still think it's interesting to…
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Agents just eat these things. After last week's HN post about Cyphral Distich, I pointed Astra and Fable at some unsolved ciphers just to see whether some joker who knew nothing about the field could get the same results, and sure enough there's plenty of low hanging fruit.https://aaymeloglu.github.io/unsolved-ciphers/But I got nothing on Daniel…
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> Astra's hypothesis for why this particular message was previously unsolved is that “TRUPPENVERSCHIEBUNG” was used as the key starting on December 9, 1918 - whereas, as noted above, this message was transmitted earlier, on November 27, 1918. The reason for this discrepancy is unknown. I don’t know how such keys were managed (how/when distributed…
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The correct title: Researcher brakes one specific stubborn historic enigma message with good help from Astra.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…
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To me an interesting example of storing all encrypted messages for a long time and then some day you’ll be able to crack and decipher them
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I'm no crypto expert at all but isn't TRUPPENVERSCHIEBUNG an actual word?Google says it translates to "troops shift"If so, I don't understand how this was difficult at all... Can't you just do a dictionary attack and then check if the resulting phrase forms a sentence?I don't understand how this couldn't be done by someone in their house with…
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> My screwdriver and mitre saw built my deck in two days.
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Neat, but "did it entirely on its own" is incongruous with "developing the necessary Python and C++ software for an Enigma simulator".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…
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Yeah, the title makes it sound much more impressive than key reuse. Could be a good avenue to check for some other encrypted messages though.
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Isn't that a very simple substitution cipher (any clear text letter is substituted by two letters of cipher text, with a fixed one-to-one correspondence)? And aren't they all amenable to very simple cryptanalysis, at least if the encrypted text is long enough, by counting how often certain letters appear, and then trying to plug in reasonable…
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So..what??? I don't get this type of posts. Still not AGI and never-ish will be, AI;DR as always.
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Even if this is true, we must avoid falling into the trap of Kasparov of betting on Centaur Chess.Just like with Kasparov's Centaur Chess, the idea of a 'human in the loop' is just a necessity due to current limitations.There will hopefully (?) come a time one day when human beings provide only ultimate value judgments, and everything else is done…
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(to be clear I agree with you) What makes you so confident?
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I am in Rosenow, Rosenow. From the article: After trying many different approaches, GPT–6 Astra focused on using the repeated place name ROSENOW ROSENOW as a crib. 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?(Is it possible that this is a misreported…
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I disagree with the black and white stance here. I do agree that we sometimes do a bad job of this. Some recent advances in math have been headlined as "AI Solves ..." when there's a human driving. But sometimes a human writes a prompt and the AI really does the work autonomously. I don't think it's anthropomorphizing to say that my dishwasher…
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To save everyone a click, the message, translated to English, is "AN ENGLISH CRUISER ARRIVED AT SEVASTOPOL ON THE ?4TH AN ALLIED SQUADRON FOLLOWS ON THE 26TH"I was surprised to see that the message was sent on November 27, 1918. That's a few weeks after the war ended, and I won't have expected the German military to still be monitoring military…
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I totally agree that attributing the title to an LLM doesn't make sense, but I also have another question: Could they do the same with GPT-3 or a weaker LLM in general? If yes, then is Astra just an accelerator? If no, then where is the line between the tool is "effective enough" to worth a bold credit and not?
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TL;DR: all keys are known because the list was seized after the war. However, this message was not previously decoded because the German operator mistyped the key, and also used a key from the wrong day.This meant that ChatGPT didn't need to brute-force the entire key, just pick the correct one from the list and identify the typo.A sufficiently…
All 5 developments of OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra cracks two long-unsolved WWI and WWII… →
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