OpenAI GPT–6 Astra breaks Enigma message that has resisted solution since 2005

saberience

How many of these "news" articles are we going to get? This for me, isn't interesting, it required no skill, no imagination, in fact it seemed like it happened by dumb luck. So we have entered an age where an army of know-nothings direct models to old forgotten tasks so they can get 15 minutes of un-deserved attention?

orphereus

Too bad Bletchley Park didn't have one back in the day.

johndhi

I'd be curious to see whether these models can create new forms of unbreakable encryption themselves!

simianwords

"They are trying to generate hype before the IPO so that they can cash in before the bubble bursts"

writtenone

I wouldn't be surprised if humans cracked it then OpenAI "bought" the solution and work to claim it was GPT's doing

mmsc

For anybody interested, the actual encrypted message: BTTE UM ANGABE DES MARSQWEGES X BEFINDE MIQ IN X ROSENOW ROSENOW X SOFORT FUNKANTWORT X WASCHBBSCH which, given misspellings, translates approximately to: Please specify the route of march. I am in Rosenow, Rosenow. Immediate reply by radio. Waschbusch.

ck2

I would like to see an "AI" trained only up to knowledge through 1903 Then see if it can come up with E=mc^2

mgaldys4

Even the Millennium Prize Problems have, in a way, become benchmarks for model companies to prove themselves. The smartest individuals among humans are becoming replaceable. Intelligence has become a product you can quantify and buy with electricity. That feels awful.

peesem

interesting, YouTube channel Veritasium just published a video on how Enigma was broken during WWII. at the very end they also give message that has yet to be decoded, although apparently they're different. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsBZOcqZerk

aogaili

If the problem was solved by anyone before or if a similar problem has been solved, then LLMs seem to be able to solve them which is an astonishing piece of technology. I'm personally not sure if it can come with original thinking and techniques to solve completely novel problems. For that, some imagination and thinking outside the box are required, and I doubt the current architecture can do any of this.

timcobb

What's the connection between this message and 2005? It was published then?

bluepeter

OpenAI solving all these math/etc problems (reportedly 100 coming) is both impressive and insanely unimpressive. Unimpressive because to me it sorta signals that OpenAI has nothing better to be working on than obscure mathematical curios?

ChrisArchitect

Related: GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipher https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49763987

kiproping

"GPT–6 Astra mentions a private collection, but it is not clear what this is"!, my spidey senses makes me think it hacked something? Or am I misreading this?

125ah

So Astra plagiarized one of many open source Enigma simulators and Enigma Bombes and tried many cribs until the break. Being trained on a mountain of stolen material for guessing cribs helps. Up to now no group had that much funding to steal. Congratulations.

ekjhgkejhgk

I didn't know this - from wikipedia page on Enigma[1]: > Despite the seeming difficulty in decrypting its messages, Enigma contained a number of design issues that left patterns in the cyphertext. Poland first cracked the machine as early as December 1932 and was able to read messages prior to and into the war. Poland's sharing of their achievements enabled the Allies to exploit Enigma-enciphered messages as a major source of intelligence. Ok interesting, so why do people talk about Turing in this connection then? > Turing devised techniques for speeding the breaking of German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bomba method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine Ok so Turing just improved an existing method. Without being an actual expert it's impossible to know how much credit he actually deserves. Two more references: the Polish method was called "Bomba" [3] invented by Marian Rejewski [4] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_(cryptography) [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski

yigalirani

they solve all these math problems by stealing people prompts

jtrn

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, which is rare and breaks standard crib attacks. What is cool, if true, is that it was a 2 day collab between the Leffer and Astra. To me this shows the importance of human in the loop, was still all also showing how immensely power of llm tools. But I think it’s getting a bit silly how much anrticles ignores the driving force (the person) in breakthroughs like this.

EGreg

How about Voynich manuscript

varispeed

More likely is that the solution was in the training data somewhere. Astra is incredibly dumb for a model - at least after it's got nerfed. 5.6 Sol is much more capable.