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.
They are low hanging fruit. This is the sort of thing it ought to be good at, and it's not particularly surprising that it is. But it is also not what is being promoted by LLM advocates on the public stage.
Investors are not putting billions into OpenAI to crack historical ciphertexts. This is supposedly a trillion dollar general purpose artificial intelligence, but still can't reliably tell me how many p's are in 'raspberry'.
Cracking pre-computer era ciphers with LLMs is like me claiming I have a super-efficient hypersonic precooled hybrid air-breathing rocket engine that will revolutionize all forms of transportation, and then for a demo bragging about how nicely I can grill with it at my backyard BBQ.
Yesterday I had one try and use Generics in a language that doesn't have Generics and then use a type declaration that is a trivially obvious error at run time. (Qwen both times).
I just asked chatgpt the run time error and this was the entire thing...
> Me: is `?mixed $foobar = null` a error in PHP 8.5?
> ChatGPT: No. In PHP 8.5, this is valid: `mixed $foobar = null` mixed includes null (as well as all other PHP types), so the default value is compatible.
> Me: did you miss the ?
> ChatGPT: Yes <SmileyEmojii> — I missed the ?. ?mixed $foobar = null is an error in PHP 8.5.
If I'd invested trillions of dollars in that industry I'd be getting worried...
Also it using emojii's and words describing emotions just makes my soul shudder.
It's not that they don’t generate useful things, they can and then the next minute they smash into the wall repeatedly because the door is 3ft to the left.
Since it's stochastic by nature you never know which the answer is going to be and they are making the same kinds of mistakes they where making a couple of years ago, I'm not sure it's actually solvable with the current approach.
aaymeloglu · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://aaymeloglu.github.io/unsolved-ciphers/" rel="nofollow">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!
<a href="https://dbourdeau.github.io/cyphersolver/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://dbourdeau.github.io/cyphersolver/index.html
greenavocado · · focus · HN ↗
GolfPopper · · focus · HN ↗
Investors are not putting billions into OpenAI to crack historical ciphertexts. This is supposedly a trillion dollar general purpose artificial intelligence, but still can't reliably tell me how many p's are in 'raspberry'.
Cracking pre-computer era ciphers with LLMs is like me claiming I have a super-efficient hypersonic precooled hybrid air-breathing rocket engine that will revolutionize all forms of transportation, and then for a demo bragging about how nicely I can grill with it at my backyard BBQ.
noir_lord · · focus · HN ↗
I just asked chatgpt the run time error and this was the entire thing...
> Me: is `?mixed $foobar = null` a error in PHP 8.5?
> ChatGPT: No. In PHP 8.5, this is valid: `mixed $foobar = null` mixed includes null (as well as all other PHP types), so the default value is compatible.
> Me: did you miss the ?
> ChatGPT: Yes <SmileyEmojii> — I missed the ?. ?mixed $foobar = null is an error in PHP 8.5.
If I'd invested trillions of dollars in that industry I'd be getting worried...
Also it using emojii's and words describing emotions just makes my soul shudder.
It's not that they don’t generate useful things, they can and then the next minute they smash into the wall repeatedly because the door is 3ft to the left.
Since it's stochastic by nature you never know which the answer is going to be and they are making the same kinds of mistakes they where making a couple of years ago, I'm not sure it's actually solvable with the current approach.