New Claude model cracked a 373-year-old unsolveable cipher in 44 minutes
The Cyphral Distich was created by Scottish writer Thomas Urquhart in 1653. The cipher consists of two lines of 32 digits each.
The new neural network model Claude Fable 5.1 has cracked the Cyphral Distich cipher, which cryptographers could not solve for 373 years. This was reported by Vals AI, a company specializing in testing artificial intelligence models.
"Using Fable 5.1, we decrypted a cipher that had remained unsolved for 373 years. Looking back, it's almost astonishingly simple," the publication states.
The Cyphral Distich was created by Scottish writer Thomas Urquhart in 1653. The cipher consists of two lines of 32 digits each.
It remained unsolved for centuries.
It was referred to as an insoluble problem in 1899 in the journal Notes and Queries, later it was again mentioned in 20th-century cryptography literature, and even later, historical cipher researcher Klaus Schmeh included it in his list of 50 most famous unsolved encrypted messages.
Fable 5.1 noticed that 32 of Urquhart's "provirations" — 32 short wishes — were placed before the cryptogram. The model matched each digit to a corresponding text fragment, used the digit as a word number, and took the first letter of that word.
The neural network spent 44 minutes and 174 thousand tokens on this task.
The resulting message was: "O God, support King Charles II and make him the supreme ruler of this land."
In 1649, after the execution of King Charles I in England, the monarchy was abolished and a republic was declared. Oliver Cromwell became the head of the country in 1653, bearing the title of Lord Protector. Cromwell died in 1658, chaos ensued in the country, and Parliament invited Charles I's son to the throne, who was crowned in 1660 as Charles II. The monarchy was restored.
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