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Comment by aaymeloglu | Hacker News Reader

Agents just eat these things. After last week's HN post about Cyphral Distich, I pointed Astra and Fable at some unsolved ciphers just to see whether some joker who knew nothing about the field could get the same results, and sure enough there's plenty of low hanging fruit.

https://aaymeloglu.github.io/unsolved-ciphers/

But I got nothing on Daniel Bordeau, who in the past week seems to have built himself a whole code breaking factory!

https://dbourdeau.github.io/cyphersolver/index.html

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Mildly interesting anecdote: when the Cyphral Distich solution popped up a few days ago, I spent about an hour with ChatGPT trying to solve it myself without looking at the proposed solution. ChatGPT opened by saying “the solution is disputed online,” and made the dispute sound fairly convincing, which struck me as odd because things like this are usually either clearly solved or clearly not.

After I gave up (mostly because ChatGPT had given me incomplete information needed to solve it) I checked the source of the dispute. It was a site very similar to this one and someone had an AI agent working on the same problem, publishing dozens or hundreds of pages of notes. The agent found the solution page and concluded it was wrong because many of the 32 source passages supposedly didn’t contain enough text.

I dug up the PDF of the book and found the mistake - whenever a passage continued onto the next page, the agent wasn’t including that continuation. The passages weren’t actually too short.

Annoying that ChatGPT can cite sources like this without being able to properly weigh their reliability.

I think this is what obstacles on the path to AGI look like now. It’s random things that would be obvious to a human but are unrepresentative in how an AI views the world and therefore it suddenly becomes seemingly incapable, despite having basically superpowers for proximal work.

I don’t mean that to say AGI is here or easy or necessarily that close but it’s likely going to feel like one thing after another until one day most of these things that make you think “how could something so capable be that dumb” are largely solved.

Yes, and right now it seems we get around this problem by spawning 10k agents (that's what OpenAI did for the stokes problem) and hoping that at least one of the 10k catches this and does it right - which it very likely will.

Great story!

Verifying sources is a recursive problem - where do you stop? Humans have intuitive feel for it, but agents don’t or at least not yet (I wonder if intuition is just a secondary neural net which is currently being added to the agents as we speak).

Also as a human you are able to examine agents erroneous trajectory, real or imaginary, without contaminating your own. Agent have a problem with that - as soon as someone else’s thought is in the context it can lose track of provenance and veracity. Sometimes I think we need a bloom filter to retroactively assign “dirty” flag to invalidated or questionable token spans already in the context.

Even before AI I strongly believed the internet was eventually going to have to move to a web of trust model. I think World ID (formerly Worldcoin) can be a really cool part of the solution to this, though people widely criticize it without fully understanding it and make assumptions that are wrong. But I agree that trust and verification is increasingly a large problem and one of the best ways to combat that is to actually choose unique identities to trust.

> I wonder if intuition is just a secondary neural net which is currently being added to the agents as we speak

Arguably, intuition is primary neural net, the only thing an LLM has without CoT, it just is spiky so humans only notice where it's below-average and just dismiss the rest as normal. Of course it's going to lag behind in some areas compared to others.

> Annoying that ChatGPT can cite sources like this without being able to properly weigh their reliability.

It can’t make it past the abstract, in some cases - just like most people!

Nice, used a similar approach for another one of these this week

https://simonklee.dk/farnese-letter

We are so jaded by constant breakthroughs that 100 year old unsolved ciphers are referred to as "low hanging fruit"

Something being old and unsolved does not make it impressive when it’s solved. The question is “has there been any concerted effort to solve it and if so how much time/effort has gone in?”

I’m sure I can make some brand new “discovery” that is completely useless, which is why it wasn’t “discovered” in the first place.

It’s simply a lot of grunt work to do these which is why many are unsolved.

They are low hanging fruit. This is the sort of thing it ought to be good at, and it's not particularly surprising that it is. But it is also not what is being promoted by LLM advocates on the public stage.

Investors are not putting billions into OpenAI to crack historical ciphertexts. This is supposedly a trillion dollar general purpose artificial intelligence, but still can't reliably tell me how many p's are in 'raspberry'.

Cracking pre-computer era ciphers with LLMs is like me claiming I have a super-efficient hypersonic precooled hybrid air-breathing rocket engine that will revolutionize all forms of transportation, and then for a demo bragging about how nicely I can grill with it at my backyard BBQ.

Yesterday I had one try and use Generics in a language that doesn't have Generics and then use a type declaration that is a trivially obvious error at run time. (Qwen both times).

I just asked chatgpt the run time error and this was the entire thing...

> Me: is `?mixed $foobar = null` a error in PHP 8.5?

> ChatGPT: No. In PHP 8.5, this is valid: `mixed $foobar = null` mixed includes null (as well as all other PHP types), so the default value is compatible.

> Me: did you miss the ?

> ChatGPT: Yes <SmileyEmojii> — I missed the ?. ?mixed $foobar = null is an error in PHP 8.5.

If I'd invested trillions of dollars in that industry I'd be getting worried...

Also it using emojii's and words describing emotions just makes my soul shudder.

It's not that they don’t generate useful things, they can and then the next minute they smash into the wall repeatedly because the door is 3ft to the left.

Since it's stochastic by nature you never know which the answer is going to be and they are making the same kinds of mistakes they where making a couple of years ago, I'm not sure it's actually solvable with the current approach.

> But it is also not what is being promoted by LLM advocates on the public stage.

It quite literally is. Right here, right now. It’s happening before your eyes, you’re actively engaging with it.

Sam Altman in July: "We are in the singularity"[3]

Anthropic's alignment lead two weeks ago: "What I am worried about is superintelligence arising from recursive self-improvement"[2]

The media, last week: "AI could kill all humans in next decade, warn experts"[3]

Meanwhile, the topic of this thread is how ChatGPT decoded a century-old ciphertext using a known method and a published key. :-| One of these four items is not in the same ballpark as the others.

1. https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence...

2. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/11/anthropic-openai-ai-existent...

3. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/09/ai-superi...

If you define "LLM Advocates" as Sam, Dario, and the mainstream media outlets that they are directly feeding their propaganda to, sure, your 3 examples are an exhaustive list and this is all that happens.

>a super-efficient hypersonic precooled hybrid air-breathing rocket engine

>I can grill with it at my backyard BBQ.

I like it!

Maybe with this piece of information we can end WWI

some things are unsolved because they're hard

but most things are unsolved because nobody even knows they exist

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