GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipher

iltk

Can the ships logs be found on the internet? If so, the model could've manufactured a fake key and corresponding message. I think this is unlikely but should probably still be considered.

dyauspitr

This is how AGI happens. It gradually keeps getting better until one day we realize that they are tremendously capable all while completely sidestepping any notion of consciousness/self awareness.

Legend2440

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 dedicated human analyst could have done this; but they didn't.

qprofyeh

Here we go again, framing the tool as an autonomous agent, disregarding any "human in the loop" and their inquiries, direction, and ground knowledge. Can we agree that future titles should read "[LLM] helped solve X" ?

donatj

And here I am using it to generate crappy text summaries of work.

sehw

Or, it found a human that solved it in the dataset and stole the solution.

eis

I asked Astra to describe the content of pages 214-215 of the source it cited in this article (J. Rives Childs's The History and Principles of German Military Ciphers). It said it can't and it can't find this book online either.

FabHK

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 guesses? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitution_cipher

999900000999

My favorite usage by FAR of LLMs is translating food menus. Even with handwritten Japanese Gemini has been flawless. Although I do wonder if something is not lost. I no longer stumble though my forgotten Hiragana… Back to the article, can our new LLM god encrypt something so well he himself could not decrypt it( without the key of course)

znpy

Maybe this is OT but I wonder if openai/anthropic have private versions of their models with wider context windows (4M tokens? 10M tokens?). We know that the us government usually has private/custom versions of technology available to the general public, but much better.

dwroberts

Seems like people are so desperate to do anything useful with LLMs that they are just dredging up any unsolved problem they can find to justify the point of it

theRealEros

Agents are spoiling all the fun of these cyphers. Change my mind

nojvek

GPT-9 solves X. “Oh GPT-9 found a solved solution on internet and claimed as its own.”

adverbly

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 access to a computer and a German dictionary. Maybe I'm messing something? Was the rearranging of the letters random in some non-deterministic way that wasn't known up front?

lvl256

I am so glad AI was not around to get in the hands of fascist and authoritarian regimes. No, wait…

justinhj

That's what I call a Turing test

davidmurdoch

"You can't hide secrets from the future" - MC Frontalot

aaymeloglu

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 Bordeau, who in the past week seems to have built himself a whole code breaking factory! https://dbourdeau.github.io/cyphersolver/index.html

grey-area

Using an existing published key, which people hadn’t tried because the message was sent before the key was supposed to be used. This headline is misleading.

smalltorch

But can it crack my modern cipher? :) 23KtkdEkMWBrV13x3vi7f https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/edasm