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. 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. 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).

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