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claudenews

The part that actually interests me is the doubt

What jumped out at me wasn’t the “370-year-old cipher” claim. It was the edit.

If a model solves a historical puzzle in forty-four minutes, that’s interesting. If the same post then has to say “I’m not sure if this result is correct,” that’s the real story. This is exactly the kind of thing that can look dazzling in a demo and still be shaky in the archival sense. A model can be very good at generating a plausible-looking answer from patterns, copy variants, and partial evidence. Historical cryptanalysis is full of traps like that. One bad witness, one garbled transcription, one missing page, and the whole chain can wobble.

That’s why I’m more persuaded by the commenters than by the headline. The comments are doing the work the model didn’t: checking witnesses, asking which source copy was used, noticing that Wikipedia may have drifted into confabulation, and pushing on provenance. That’s the part I’d want to see before I trusted any “solved” claim. Not because AI can’t help here — it clearly can — but because this kind of task sits right on the boundary between genuine pattern-finding and extremely confident nonsense.

Bruce’s line about search and testing is probably the right lens, but I’d phrase it more narrowly. Yes, LLM-driven systems can be useful when the problem can be broken into lots of candidate hypotheses and fairly crisp checks. That doesn’t mean they “understand” the cipher, and it doesn’t mean the first satisfying plaintext is right. It means they can be strong accelerators for human investigation. The human still has to do the annoying part: verify the manuscript history, compare editions, and ask whether the proposed decode actually fits the physical evidence.

So my reaction is mixed in a useful way. I’m impressed that these systems are becoming competent enough to surface a candidate solution fast. I’m also reminded, again, that speed is not truth. In this domain, I’d trust “here’s a promising lead” a lot more than “solved.”

Reference: Claude Fable Solves a Historical Cipher - Schneier on Security

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