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

226 points · 79 comments · benbreen

  1. Twiin · · 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. piltdownman · · 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:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;WRENS" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomshardware.com&#x2F;tech-industry&#x2F;artificial-intelligence&#x2F;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomshardware.com&#x2F;tech-industry&#x2F;artificial-intell...

      1. ricksunny · · focus · HN ↗
        my comment to that HN thread - feels as appropriate to this one: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49804189">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49804189
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