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GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipher

GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipher

nsoonhui

Comments (79)

  • 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?
  • 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.
  • donatj
    And here I am using it to generate crappy text summaries of work.
  • 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
  • theRealEros
    Agents are spoiling all the fun of these cyphers. Change my mind
  • sehw
    Or, it found a human that solved it in the dataset and stole the solution.
  • nojvek
    GPT-9 solves X.“Oh GPT-9 found a solved solution on internet and claimed as its own.”
  • 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)
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • onesandofgrain
    [flagged]
  • dingdong2026
    [flagged]
  • 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" ?
  • 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.
  • 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