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  • Hacker News
  • > 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.

    by amelius
  • Superintelligence ≈ Stupidity × Persistence
    by andai
  • When a human solves a difficult problem by trying many approaches, we call it "persistence".
    by slashdave
  • Please stop abusing the term 'brute-force'. This is not brute force. Rarely is there a non trivial problem you can sove in one master stroke.
    by famouswaffles
  • There is a reason even intelligent people go back to brute force for certain problems.
    by trentor
  • >Sounds more like brute forcing than intelligence

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

    by prvc
  • 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.
    by al_borland
  • I don't think it counts as brute forcing unless you're resorting to trying every possible solution. And clearly the LLM didn't do that here, because there would be near-infinite possible solutions.

    I don't think we can really call "trying lots of different ideas for an extended period" "brute-forcing," unless we use that term for lots of humans who have struggled with hard math problems for years.

    by SamBam
  • I'm waiting for someone with enough tokens to ask 'Who is Satoshi?'
    by angry_octet
  • It's Adam Back.
    by MP_1729
  • > 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.

    by Retr0id
  • “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it—people like me.”
    by slashdave
  • https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2XcNSSgKvlE
    by tcdent
  • 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.
    by ademup
  • Career path:

       software engineer -> prompt engineer -> positive affirmation engineer
    by jonas21
  • 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."

    by jrop
  • 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?
    by GranPC
  • I googled for "cyphral distich" before:2026-08-30, and found barely anything that was relevant. Mostly incorrectly dated pages about this exact thing. In fact, the only instance I can really find is this website, which seems to be an archive of a magazine issue from 1927 https://toebes.com/Flynns/Flynns-19270813.htm (it also has a scan of the original text of the magazine in the top right). This facebook post https://www.facebook.com/groups/2600net/posts/46775529324677... seems to indicate it is found in at least one edition of the book
    by voidUpdate
  • I don't see it in https://archive.org/details/worksofsirthomas0000urqu or https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1641-170...

    I also don't find it on the site of "Klaus Schmeh" that it claims to be on a list of "Top 50 unsolved encrypted messages": https://klausschmeh.net/?s=Cyphral

    Looks like the best source I can find is this: https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2014/11/17/we... which seems real-ish?

    by SahAssar
  • I found this german blog: https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2014/11/17/we...

    which links to: https://archive.org/details/s9notesqueries03londuoft/page/12...

    which is in reference to the original proquiritations here: https://archive.org/details/worksofsirthomas00mait/page/416/...

    i had also never heard of this before today and wonder if people had even seriously tried to decipher this at all?

    by fxwin
  • 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...

    by elahieh
  • Cipher noob question: is there any check that can be done to ensure a cipher is actually decodable? What if the author made a flaw when encoding it, so that it's not actually solvable?
    by notpachet
  • You should probably read the article if you want to know the answer. It's in the section called "elicitation".
    by chr15m
  • 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.
    by MisterMunchkin
  • 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.

    by redfloatplane
  • Confusion is because people are using the tool to get answers. Its how the edu systems trains most people in tool use. Heres a saw and here is a block of wood. Do x y z and you get a table. But if you are interested in why the saw looks like it does or the entire process behind generating that block of wood, or why x y z instead if a b c good luck to you using the current edu system. You have to live in an extremely rich country, with surplus resource to entertain those exploration. This has now changed.

    The answer the tool gives has never been the real reward. The real reward is the path taken through a complex landscape to get to Maxwells Equations for example. At the end of that story what we get is not just the equation but a map of the landscape explored. That map has larger influence and value than the equations or answers themselves. Because all future exploration find it super useful.

    People are just learning they can start asking for maps rather than answers.

    by nfujd7
  • Congrats on your map! I am leaning more towards the optimism side. Like you I've had some real breakthroughs myself. Personal akin your garden map, no where near solving millennium problems. My take is that all these (Fable solves this, OpenAI does that, AI will take over the world) Marketing Stunts will fade some day when the true cost of tokens hits the market. You and I may have to contend with lesser models, but will probably get work done just fine.
    by dingdongditchme
  • I have a very high p(doom \/ utopia) so pretty much feeling like I won’t have to worry about the future.
    by lowbloodsugar
  • I appreciate reading this, for the past year or so as it pertains to AI, I've just not been able to settle my mind, and it's become a bit exhusting. I presumed I wasn't the only one who swings back and forth and it's comforting to read someone else post the same thing, makes me feel a less nutso. :)
    by neom
  • "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-...

    by elahieh