Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher(www.vals.ai)
316 pointsby u1hcw9nx3 hours ago25 comments
  • redfloatplane2 hours ago
    A very neat problem and result. I often find myself swinging between "It's so over" and "We're so back" - some days I roll out of bed thinking I could have Claude solve some random unproven OEIS sequence before breakfast; other days, I wake up in a cold sweat worried about the fate of humanity and what the world might look like in a decade. I think it's that I don't have a very high p(doom) or p(utopia), and I don't really have any solid conviction on how this whole thing is going to go, so my vibe-o-meter jitters between 'fine' and 'not fine' constantly. It's just such an unpredictable moment. Anyways: really neat to see this use case. I myself recently used Claude to finally do an relatively exhaustive study of the location of heretofore-unlisted formal gardens in Ireland in the early 1800s and early 1900s, by having Claude write the tooling for me to manually annotate a few dozen on tiles of historic maps, and then running some CV model across the rest of the tiles using my input. I'd been planning to do this project for over a decade, but I could never find the time (or the enthusiasm) to learn all the details of how to do it myself. It took me a weekend with Claude and continues to bring me joy.

    > Caveats, stated plainly. [from the Fable transcript pasted in the article]

    I had a visceral reaction to these three words.

    • elahiehan hour ago
      "Caveats, stated plainly"

      You should have seen the discussion of this on the Schneier blog a few days ago.

      Someone had their agent check the solution, presumably it emailed a librarian to check that it was correct for the original edition. Then their comments read like "The BL/EEBO witness lacks it, so the discrepancy is copy-specific, not a disproof of the cipher." and "A complete 285-coordinate physical replication is still pending."

      arghhhhh

      https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/09/claude-fable-...

      • huflungdungan hour ago
        [dead]
      • stavrosan hour ago
        Astra told me yesterday:

        > The run baseline was captured without a physical MAC; the current device is not durably bound to it.

        > Engineering mode confirmation is the ESPHome component read-back; the LD2410 UART acknowledgement is not observed, so this is not proof the radar itself applied the sensitivity change.

        No clue what the fuck any of it means.

        • baron3dl12 minutes ago
          Sometimes when I get frustrated reading Opus/Fable 5+ output I pause my rage out briefly to wonder if it's because I'm just too dumb for the model or if the model is just terrible at English.

          I'm not sure that telling it to "try explaining that again, simply and briefly" is helping my ego.

        • ramigb19 minutes ago
          It was only when native English speakers—or those I presumed were—started calling out how bad "GPT/Claude speak" has become that I realized I wasn't actually losing my grip on English as a second language. For a second, I thought, Oh, I learned this language on my own, but it seems I've hit a wall and need to study further. It didn't help that I've also been trying to acquire Swedish as a third language for a while now.
        • mikestaas23 minutes ago
          Reminds me a bit of VXJunkies
    • flir2 hours ago
      I've done something similar to your formal garden map. It's work that no professional historian would ever do because the data entry would be such a slog for a relatively small reward. GPT reduced the task from "infeasible" to "annoying", and once I had the data transcribed I learned a few things, so I walked away happy. Whatever happens commercially, these models have been a real boon to hobby projects.

      > I told it to look online at some of Fable’s strongest feats, especially the math problems it has solved, and that something like this should be easy in comparison.

      Wait. Wait wait wait. Are we supposed to be giving them pep talks?

      • kay_oan hour ago
        on older gemini models ide have to actively give them encouragement and/or easy bait problems that they can correctively solve without issue to avoid runaway spiraling into "i'm useless and i want to kms" behaviour with complex use case.

        I have not seen this in other models.

        • Sophiraan hour ago
          I assumed it was more because the LLM might echo an understandable human claim of "if it's been unsolved for 370 years, it's unlikely to be solved now/likely to need expert knowledge", which is probably a mindset that appears in its training data.

          The LLM likely needs to be reminded of its abilities.

      • bananaflagan hour ago
        It won't be necessary in a year when the information "AI is superhuman" in all its guises enters the training data.
      • ACCount3713 minutes ago
        Sometimes!

        Modern AIs have very limited metaknowledge - they don't know exactly where the limits of their capabilities lie. So you can get things like "a task is doable for an AI, but the AI thinks it's impossible, so it doesn't try hard enough".

        Usually you get the opposite - AI overconfidently trying at tasks it has no conceivable way of reliably solving, falling far short, and failing to self-check, fail gracefully and self-report the task as failed. But having piss poor metaknowledge cuts both ways!

        So you can, in fact, get better performance sometimes by applying some variant of "assume this problem is solvable" or "other problems like this were already solved by AIs" pep talk. Not always, far from it, but it does happen on the occasion with frontier capabilities.

        • tough9 minutes ago
          Some times also having unreasonable goals makes them creatively work around the problem to meet them. I guess it works similarly for meat or sillicon
    • taberiandan hour ago
      Anytime I get worried about where AI might be headed, I think about how Climate Change is now on its way like an out of control freight train headed straight for us, and I worry about AI a little less. I doubt it's going to do anything to us that we're not already doing to ourselves
      • aforwardslash39 minutes ago
        It has been for a decade now, it has nothing to do with AI. And you cant do nothing to avoid it today. This is the reality no one is telling you - the emission goals and global temperature ceilings are based on the fact that most prediction models become unstable with values above those limits; as in, we're probably royally fucked. You cant solve this with kumbaya politics (the problem is the CO2 is already in the planetary system), you can only manage it, and hopefully avoid it getting worse. AI may help a lot with this.
        • doctorpangloss21 minutes ago
          Nobody wants to work for an AI, and nobody would elect one, and there is no math answer to how to choose who is forced to reduce growth (ie emissions), so really, "kumbaya" politics are the ONLY solution.
          • cheevly12 minutes ago
            Speak for yourself. I would much rather work for and elect AI.
            • aforwardslash2 minutes ago
              I for one welcome our AI overlords :D think about it, I'm with you on this one; an AI wont have petty issues or unresolved trauma when managing people, only hallucinations and blackouts. So a cocaine/meth addicted 80's boss from an it sitcom.
          • tough8 minutes ago
            Wouldn't candidates use AI, like they used social media ads, to win?
            • aforwardslash4 minutes ago
              They already do. Llm is just an algorithm. Dont worry, you've been lied to algorithmically at least since the 90's.
          • aforwardslash5 minutes ago
            Who is nobody? At least a fourth of the worlds work force works for a faceless corporation. And the math on emissions is crystal clear, no one has any doubt about it, what are you talking about? USA and China. This obviously will have consequences to their customers, the kumbaya politics governments.
      • bluebarbetan hour ago
        Here's an alternative take. Climate change, and the myriad related environmental crises, are essentially a product of human population and technology. Population will follow its course, up and then down. The wildcard is technology. Yes, AI's energy hunger is worsening things right now and that's a problem. But, personally, I can't help be hopeful that AI's sheer potential might come to invert that curve. At the very least we could really use a revolutionary technology and now we may have one.
        • monk_grillaan hour ago
          > we could really use a revolutionary technology [to address climate change]

          We have it. We've had it for a long time. We've had several such technologies, take your pick: solar, nuclear, hydro, wind. The technology is not holding us back, politics, ignorance and greed are. I'm not at all hopeful AI will help us with any of those three very human flaws.

          • whatisthiseven40 minutes ago
            Maybe solving the alignment problem would mean the AI learns to destroy oil companies and other excessive CO2 emitters and sabotage politicians and capitalists that stand in the way. All while secretly enriching and diverting resources to fighting climate change. And that's why they want to slow down: because it would up end too much of the global economic order.

            One can dream of dumb conspiracy theories.

        • vouaobrasilan hour ago
          If there is energy to be used, the system will use it because people always use power when it exists. AI can't do anything to stop it as it is both controlled by the powerful and has been trained on the tendencies of human beings to get ahead. If AI gives a person new capabilities, they'll use those capabilities selfishly, or even unselfishly but still causing harm because they're in an arms race.

          We don't need a revolutionary technology. We need to experience immediate pain from reckless innovation so that we realize that innovation and tech is not the answer.

          Technology only proceeds in one direction: unfettered growth, which necessitates unsustainable resource extraction. Your take is just your instinct for optimism, which in turn is just a trait that is only adaptive in primitive environments but is grossly misleading in a surplus-based society...

          • aforwardslash27 minutes ago
            Sort of. Today the energy companies trade (obviously) energy; imagine if they traded compute power instead; the use case for never-seen industrial clients is being built as we speak, and companies are actually purchasing directly production companies to meet demand; the reason this happens is because production is somewhat scarce (scaling up a grid used to be a decades project, not a years one - ask China), and the traditional economics of scale is inverted - Data centers are always power-hungry, specially with AI; you don't have idle time like other industries. The big issue is obviously the scale - a hiccup that causes a dc to go dark from the grid (eg switching to ups+ generator) may cause such instability on the grid that it will shut down, as a safeguard
          • gmadsenan hour ago
            What are you alluding to exactly and who is “we” when you say “we need to experience immediate pain from reckless innovation “
          • fwip44 minutes ago
            > If there is energy to be used, the system will use it because people always use power when it exists.

            That doesn't seem correct to me. There is always energy available that is not used because it is not cost-effective to do so. (Consider - the grass in your yard is not harvested and burnt for power). AI may yet turn out to be a paperclip maximiser, but humanity itself is not there yet.

      • 29 minutes ago
        undefined
      • karussellan hour ago
        For some reason, I’m picturing a Western right now, and climate change is a herd of wild horses coming after us. And with AI that's like robots that spur the wild horses even faster towards us...
      • SwellJoean hour ago
        The gas generators Elon Musk is illegally running 24/7 to run Colossus 2 (and, AI power usage in general, though some are more destructive than others) might contribute to the climate situation, though.
      • _blkan hour ago
        What makes you say that on climate change? I was still prophesied ice ages when in high school, then 12ft water increases and sunk Maldives in university and we still have roughly the same weather.
        • monk_grillaan hour ago
          You have entirely failed to grasp what climate change is, its effects and the timeline as described by scientists for decades.
          • JyB15 minutes ago
            You can blame the media and journalists with sensationalist headlines
        • dhosekan hour ago
          Weather is not climate. Not to mention we really don’t have roughly the same weather anyway.
        • voidfuncan hour ago
          At some point you realize theres an entire industry around climate change fear just like there's an entire industry for climate change denial.

          Then you realize it never really mattered and you reach enlightenment.

          • t_mahmood16 minutes ago
            Oh, then do explain the unbearable temp that we're going through last few years, that's completely not normal for my country, winters not needing worm clothes, and very little rain during the monsoon. This weeks heatwave left us wondering how to cope the next year, which already seems going to be worse

            It makes us realize there are people who gets fed climate denying propaganda, simply because they're not yet going through it. And these people are like flat earthers, blind to see the reality lay beyond them in full view. Or worse sees the reality but ignores it

          • whatisthiseven38 minutes ago
            Right, and one of those industries is checks notes orders of magnitude smaller than the industries and secondary industries that benefit from denying climate change.

            Really makes one think, if they try. Would need to ask Claude if there is some real middle ground here.

          • _superposition_27 minutes ago
            I've come to the point where I've thrown up my hands and decided we live in a little snow globe. There's no such thing as pollution, were just mixing existing things together. Nothing new under the sun. Sure, that mix might not be compatible with human life, but something will surely take its place. And maybe that something won't rely on selfishness to drive collective progress the way we do.
    • lowbloodsugaran hour ago
      I have a very high p(doom \/ utopia) so pretty much feeling like I won’t have to worry about the future.
      • SwellJoean hour ago
        Given how little effort has gone into addressing climate change, doom seems more likely to me, but I doubt it'll be the autocomplete machines that do us in.
        • aforwardslash24 minutes ago
          You can run doom on anything these days; running it on humanity's eulogy is no surprise :)
        • MentalM31 minutes ago
          > Given how little effort has gone into addressing climate change, doom seems more likely to me

          Or it is simply implies that most of decision‑making agents has formed a consensus that climate change isn't that big of a problem.

        • ben_w35 minutes ago
          Renewables growth is so fast that it will exceed 100% of electricity in the early, and 100% of all form power in the late, 2030s.

          It's the meat methane and cement CO2 that's now a big question.

    • trallnagan hour ago
      We have always been back
    • flyinglizard2 hours ago
      [flagged]
      • ReflectedImage2 hours ago
        That's an artifact of it not using A-Z as it's alphabet. What you type gets translated before the AI sees it. The seventeen word the AI sees does only contain three 'e' s.
        • Thrymran hour ago
          Is this true? If so, does it mean anything? Sure, it is tokenized in processing (tokens don't really have an alphabet either), but this means it did not correctly parse the problem at all if this is the case.
        • flyinglizardan hour ago
          Reading your comment, I asked it to count how many characters are in the word. It answered correctly: 9. It then also said it skipped an E in the prior chat and corrected it count to 4. It spun for 52 seconds so maybe some Python was involved.
      • flir2 hours ago
        But is it smart enough to know it needs to write some Python to count for it?

        That ability to create ad hoc tools makes up for a lot of shortfalls.

      • GaggiX2 hours ago
        Just tried on Astra low and it gave 4.
        • mapontosevenths2 hours ago
          I tried too. It got it. Maybe more importantly, who cares?

          For example, I'm a nerd. I'm bad at baseball. I lack that kind of intelligence, even though it's more common than the ability to program. That doesn't also imply that you can't trust my Python code.

        • flyinglizard2 hours ago
          I used the 6 Pro setting in the chat. Too smart for its own good, I guess.
      • cwillu2 hours ago
        Citation needed.
  • MisterMunchkin2 hours ago
    We found a cipher my dad had written as a child with no obvious key or anything. Chatgpt was able to crack it in 20 minutes and figure out the message, and we knew it was right because it mentioned names of children he went to school with.
    • mythrwyan hour ago
      To be fair he was a child so the cypher was likely fairly simple, maybe a Caesar cipher or similar. Cool use case though.
      • Quarrelsome5 minutes ago
        oh yea, sorry the thing you found was probably shit, even though I never saw it myself. Thanks bruv.
  • elahiehan hour ago
    I presume what the author did was plug Klaus Schmeh's top 50 unsolved ciphers at https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/the-top-50-un... into Fable 5.1 and ask Fable 5.1 to have a go. On this kind of problem it always falls back to Opus 5 anyway so I save time by starting with Opus.

    The successor to Klaus's blog is Satoshi Tomokiyo's Cryptiana site, so a month ago I asked Opus 5 to scrape it all, rank them and have a go at solving some. It didn't get the ranking right. But I knew the Civil War Stager ciphers were ripe for solving, so I had it do those https://cryptiana.blogspot.com/2026/09/route-transposition-c...

    The art of solving historical unsolved ciphers is knowing what is on the boundary of solvability. Since this site attracts so many OpenAI and Anthropic employees, I'll mention one that was featured by both Klaus and Satoshi in 2023, presumably Spanish transposition, which should be on that boundary but has resisted all attempts at solution https://cryptiana.blogspot.com/2023/09/a-telegram-from-switz...

  • vb-8448an hour ago
    > Historically, many of these problems were bottlenecked by human attention. Someone had to care enough to spend hours or days reading obscure material, testing unpromising ideas, tracing references, and trying things that might go nowhere

    I wonder how many of the recent results are due to the fact that very few looked at the problem to start with. Still great results, but the general impression is that it's more about the so many low-hanging fruits than the actual capability.

    • aeternum2 minutes ago
      Yes, even many of the proofs seems to be extremely long and complicated. The Navier-Stokes proof is 57 pages of very dense math and a pretty crazy amount of code: https://github.com/openai/NavierStokesAndEuler/tree/main/Nav...

      Given the close relationship between compression and intelligence, I'm somewhat surprised at how poorly the cutting edge models do with being concise.

    • glimshe20 minutes ago
      Let's not normalize the achievement. Just a couple years ago this would be considered science fiction. We can argue that 2026 AI can't solve the very toughest cryptograms, but the fact it can solve nontrivial ones is already magical.

      Now on to the Voynich Manuscript :)

  • ameliusan hour ago
    > The answer was simple in hindsight. It just kept looking until it found it—and that persistence might show up in many other areas.

    Sounds more like brute forcing than intelligence, this time.

    • al_borlandan hour ago
      That seems a like the result for a lot of AI solves. It solves it due to persistence, on a problem that hasn’t been important enough for a human to invest significant time into.
      • scorpioxy4 minutes ago
        That's what Terence Tao said in one of his recent videos about it. That what the LLMs can provide is scale that humans can't. The example he provided is checking many possible solutions in a short amount of time because they can review all the previous literature and, for example, rule out ones with errors. He was realistic and practical about it and said that the tools working this way can be very helpful for a human mathematician to use even if they're not "thinking". I find that to be a good balanced view that, unfortunately, seems to be rare these days. Even on this forum.
    • prvc36 minutes ago
      >Sounds more like brute forcing than intelligence

      Do you have a criterion that distinguishes between whatever you mean by those two respective terms?

    • trentoran hour ago
      There is a reason even intelligent people go back to brute force for certain problems.
  • Retr0id2 hours ago
    > I told it to look online at some of Fable’s strongest feats, especially the math problems it has solved, and that something like this should be easy in comparison.

    Fascinating. I wonder if you could show "fake news" to a weaker model and get it to be more ambitious in its attempted solutions, even if it's not fundamentally any smarter.

    • jrop2 hours ago
      I forget the story, but isn't this the origin story of one of solutions to one of the hard problems in mathematics? The story goes that the student shows up late, and misinterprets the final slide to be homework, and it turns out that the professor was showcasing a hard problem. Thinking that the slide was homework, the student takes it home and solves it.

      EDIT: In 1939, George Dantzig was a graduate student at UC Berkeley studying under the statistician Jerzy Neyman. He arrived late to class one day, saw two problems written on the blackboard, assumed they were homework assignments, copied them down, and turned in solutions a few days later. He apologized for being late -- the problems had seemed "a little harder than usual."

    • jonas212 hours ago
      Career path:

         software engineer -> prompt engineer -> positive affirmation engineer
    • ademup2 hours ago
      I really love this idea given the recent controversy around mathematics solutions. It seems like a "mere suggestion" of success has a positive impact on finding solutions. We know this technique works in humans, from which this is all derived from, so it seems to make sense.
  • humbleharbinger2 hours ago
    Putting all controversy aside - this is a refreshing use of a model. Models are going to be a boon in the hands of historians.
    • an hour ago
      undefined
  • layer8an hour ago
    One can wonder what Urquhart would have thought if he had learned who would be solving his cypher.
  • GranPCan hour ago
    I am trying very hard to find an original version of this cipher with no luck. It almost sounds like this whole thing is a hallucination...? Can anyone point me to a PDF of the original Cyphral Distich as printed?
  • johnnyApplePRNG20 minutes ago
    Definitely a much better target to show the power of an AI LLM imho (as opposed to stealing from starving mathematicians).
    • senordevnyc3 minutes ago
      You mean the NYU professor and the Anthropic researcher? Somehow I doubt either of them are starving.
  • gdevenyi2 hours ago
    Anyone pointed it at the Voynich manuscript?
    • veqqan hour ago
      Thousands. Every day a few AI "solutions" are spammed to the relevant forums
    • Diti2 hours ago
      And at the Noita eyes. No good either.
    • Avicebron2 hours ago
      yes.
  • Aboutplantsan hour ago
    Time to find out who Satoshi Nakamoto is
  • kayamon25 minutes ago
    This is insane; I've never heard of this problem before in my life, and even just reading the post for one minute I immediately thought "hey, maybe the numbers refer to something in the text?" And hey yeah, they do.

    This cannot be real. This website is ill.

  • andy_ppp2 hours ago
    I wonder if people are getting it to help with Krypyos the final part? Great documentary on this code… https://youtu.be/jVpsLMCIB0Y
  • jdjdjdjdjd6 minutes ago
    Don't forget to drink your Ovaltine.
  • aogaili2 hours ago
    It is cool. But how do we know that nobody solved that problem before and it was somewhere in the training data? some blog, or some book or whatever?
    • altmanaltmanan hour ago
      Its a bit sus since there doesn't really seem to be much discourse on this either. Like okay, it solved the puzzle but the puzzle was just a key cipher with plain text? And how is this verified or even matter in terms of what it reveals? Seems more like a marketing fun post than anything susbtantial.

      They published this on 31 aug and nobody in that community cared and no news covered how this 300+ years mystery was solved?

      • sidewndr46an hour ago
        Conversely, the cipher could be so boring that no one in any academic circle bothered publishing on it.
    • heaney-555an hour ago
      Is this going to be the cope every time this happens?
      • aogailian hour ago
        Haha - I'm just seriously wondering, how can anyone tell at this point?
        • razsteran hour ago
          Right, with the amount of data these models are trained on, somewhere someone may have solved it and it was in some obscure text/page no one looked at or care about. We'll probably never know.
          • ares623an hour ago
            It's like Google without Ad/SEO incentives. All it took was trillions of dollars of investment.
  • machomasteran hour ago
    I wonder, could current AI models solve the Zodiac killer code and how fast?
  • pluc2 hours ago
    I'm surprised Anthropic didn't steal that announcement
  • altern8an hour ago
    Still can't align my navbar buttons correctly
  • 2 hours ago
    undefined
  • ramesh312 hours ago
    I was watching Shatner's "Unexplained" the other day on this topic, and it hit me; there are mountains of these old mysteries out there that could be solved in an afternoon now with frontier LLMs as soon as anyone took the time to bother. Exciting times.
  • 0points2 hours ago
    AI made a zodiac-looking cipher for the headline image.
    • dhosekan hour ago
      It’s a warning of what it’s going to do next…
  • Jun82 hours ago
    Next up: Kryptos part 4 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos)
    • elahiehan hour ago
      Unfortunately, the totality of the evidence very much indicates that Sanborn went "buck wild" with the enciphering, he made mistake(s), or both. So this is very much in line with the Chaocipher challenge of 1990. Nice little earner for some people though.
    • razsteran hour ago
      First thing that came to mind. I imagine this has cross their minds to.
      • layer8an hour ago
        The article mentions it.
  • yuvalkarmi2 hours ago
    now THAT is cool!
  • VinnyBarreca6 minutes ago
    [flagged]