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Claude Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher

100 points u1hcw9nx 1 hour ago 21 comments

Retr0id 20 minutes ago | parent

> I told it to look online at some of Fable’s 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.

jrop 18 minutes ago | parent

I forget the story, but isn't this the origin story of one of solutions to one of the hard problems in mathematics? The story goes that the student shows up late, and misinterprets the final slide to be homework, and it turns out that the professor was showcasing a hard problem. Thinking that the slide was homework, the student takes it home and solves it.

EDIT: In 1939, George Dantzig was a graduate student at UC Berkeley studying under the statistician Jerzy Neyman. He arrived late to class one day, saw two problems written on the blackboard, assumed they were homework assignments, copied them down, and turned in solutions a few days later. He apologized for being late -- the problems had seemed "a little harder than usual."

ademup 17 minutes ago | parent

I really love this idea given the recent controversy around mathematics solutions. It seems like a "mere suggestion" of success has a positive impact on finding solutions. We know this technique works in humans, from which this is all derived from, so it seems to make sense.

jonas21 1 minute ago | parent

Career path:

   engineer -> prompt engineer -> positive affirmation engineer

redfloatplane 18 minutes ago | parent

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.

flyinglizard 6 minutes ago | parent

If that helps you sleep better, Astra apparently can not count the four 'e' in the word seventeen; it insists there are just three.

GaggiX 3 minutes ago | parent

Just tried on Astra low and it gave 4.

flyinglizard 1 minute ago | parent

I used the 6 Pro setting in the chat. Too smart for its own good, I guess.

cwillu 3 minutes ago | parent

Citation needed.

flir 3 minutes ago | parent

But is it smart enough to know it needs to write some Python to count for it?

That ability to create ad hoc tools makes up for a lot of shortfalls.

flir 4 minutes ago | parent

I've done something similar to your formal garden map. It's work that no professional historian would ever do because the data entry would be such a slog for a relatively small reward. GPT reduced the task from "infeasible" to "annoying", and once I had the data transcribed I learned a few things, so I walked away happy. Whatever happens commercially, these models have been a real boon to hobby projects.

humbleharbinger 18 minutes ago | parent

Putting all controversy aside - this is a refreshing use of a model. Models are going to be a boon in the hands of historians.

ramesh31 18 minutes ago | parent

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.

gdevenyi 11 minutes ago | parent

Anyone pointed it at the Voynich manuscript?

Avicebron 8 minutes ago | parent

yes.

Diti 4 minutes ago | parent

And at the Noita eyes. No good either.

MisterMunchkin 7 minutes ago | parent

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.

yuvalkarmi 6 minutes ago | parent

now THAT is cool!

0points 2 minutes ago | parent

Weird seeing a zodiac cipher in the headlining image about a unrelated cipher.

andy_ppp 1 minute ago | parent

I wonder if people are getting it to help with Krypyos the final part? Great documentary on this code… https://youtu.be/jVpsLMCIB0Y