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Comment by aogaili | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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?

Conversely, the cipher could be so boring that no one in any academic circle bothered publishing on it.

Is this going to be the cope every time this happens?

Haha - I'm just seriously wondering, how can anyone tell at this point?

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.

It's like Google without Ad/SEO incentives. All it took was trillions of dollars of investment.

I don't think a single person reading or upvoting had ever heard of this extremely obscure cipher until this post hit the front page, it's not "cope" to use basic critical thinking to ask questions like "was this cipher well known" and "were there many attempts to solve it before now"... that's pretty much Information Literacy 101.

I think the point is that rather than YOU finding out the answers to those questions, and post only if the answers were indicative of some "gotcha", someone ALWAYS posts something similar to your OP as a lazy/low-effort way to discredit LLMs.

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