Thread

Using Opus 5.5 to discover a new eyewitness record of the dodo

226 points · 79 comments · benbreen

Twiin · 1790948492 · focus · HN ↗
Last week I used Opus 5.5 to decipher a number of Waffen-SS Truppenschlüssel messages from 1941 that had never been broken. It was a similar approach, I used it to find, transcribe, and process over 10K images from various archives of WW2 material. Within that material was text I could use to help break day ciphers, to use as cribs, and so on. Opus didn't find a new vulnerability in these 85 year old ciphers, but it allowed me to process data at scale in languages I don't speak, and to write a dozen solvers in the time it would have taken me to write one or two by hand. Took what would have taken a research grant, three assistants and a year of time and turned it into a weekend project.
1. stasomatic · 1790952952 · focus · HN ↗
  Did to work though, not clear? If it did, what was in the messages?
2. piltdownman · 1790954947 · focus · HN ↗
  It's incredible when outlined in the context of a known problem domain, and the estimated effort in legacy terms, how far we've come in such a short space of time.
  If the introduction HP-65 was the first time an individual was capable of fully replicating the logical and cryptanalytic functionality of the WWII Turing-Welchman Bombe, then the roll-out of Agentic AI could be said to represent the first time an individual was capable of replicating the functionality and deliverables of the WRENs of Bletchley Park. Mindboggling.
  <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WRENS" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WRENS
  Even more impressive is the Astra-6 report recently. Given access to the Crypto Cellar Research archive of unbroken intercepts, the AI wrote its own custom Python and C++ software to simulate an Enigma machine and a mechanical Enigma Bombe.
  <a href="https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/chatgpt-6-astra-cracks-1941-enigma-coded-message-in-two-days-autonomous-ai-coded-its-own-simulator-to-crack-code-that-was-unsolved-since-it-was-shared-online-back-in-2005" rel="nofollow">https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
  1. ricksunny · 1790955506 · focus · HN ↗
    my comment to that HN thread - feels as appropriate to this one: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49804189">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49804189
  2. Twiin · 1790960501 · focus · HN ↗
    Opus did this as well, I had it working on the (now-solved) Enigma messages but I killed the run after a couple of days of CPU time. When the Astra-6 report came out I compared the method to what I had been running, and I had the right crib about 4 hours down the road in my queue and it would have been solved then. (Or, and there's a lesson to learn here, if I had made my solver a little more tolerant towards garbled letters, it would have solved it in the first couple of hours).
3. benbreen · 1790956101 · focus · HN ↗
  Very interesting, have you written this up anywhere? Curious if these add up to new historical knowledge or if they are more just conveying information we already knew. At a certain point as we gather more finds like this I suspect it will tip from the former to the latter.
  1. Twiin · 1790960169 · focus · HN ↗
    I haven't written it up yet (maybe this weekend) but I did submit my solves to Cryptocellar, and I'm credited with them on the 1941 Messages List. The contents were varied but ranged from things like "700 field howitzer shells received" to "[so-and-so] admitted to hospital at [location]" to artillery targeting information. I don't suspect there's a lot of new historical value in these, but no doubt those more qualified to judge will look at all these new messages soon enough.
4. guiomie · 1790959702 · focus · HN ↗
  As an armchair ww2 historian, I'd love a blog post on the technique et the content deciphered.
  1. Twiin · 1790960995 · focus · HN ↗
    I'll put something together this weekend. I had actually started writing it up very early for several days worth of messages, but someone else broke them and submitted them while I was building a little site with a web decoder and writing my results up. 85 years of sitting there unbroken, and then Opus 5.5 comes out and multiple people are solving it within hours of each other.
    In any case I stopped writing it up at that point and tried to focus on the messages. But I have the mostly-done writeup and I'll post it soon.
5. KellyCriterion · 1790971107 · focus · HN ↗
  > Waffen-SS Truppenschlüssel
  Do you work in university/research/history & co, or how did you find this specific niche? :-D

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