GoKawiilWe gave Claude Fable 5.1 an open task: solve an unsolved 370-year-old cipher. It solved it within a day.
Problem
We gave Claude Fable 5.1 an open task: solve Sir Thomas Urquhart’s Cyphral Distich. It appears to have actually solved it, and the solution is quite embarrassing for humans in hindsight.
At the end of Urquhart’s Logopandecteision is a cryptogram consisting of two lines of 32 numbers each, called the Cyphral Distich. A cryptogram is a short message deliberately encoded so it can’t be read without knowing the rule that produced it. Here the entire puzzle input is these 64 numbers, and the goal is to recover the hidden plaintext:
5.3.27.38.32.14.21.8.66.8.70.39.5.9.12.18.2.3.56.5.1.7.3.2.13.19.3.25.9.3.16.6. 25.15.13.6.11.20.5.1.2.12.1.20.20.49.20.20.35.33.4.6.8.35.5.33.5.5.18.10.3.11.32.42.
This cipher has remained seemingly unsolved for centuries. It was posed as an open problem in Notes and Queries in 1899, appeared again in 20th-century cryptography literature, and was later listed by historical-cipher researcher Klaus Schmeh among his Top 50 unsolved encrypted messages.
Various people attempted to decipher it, but it seems they were missing one crucial hint. They tried methods like frequency analysis, substitution, and homophonic substitution, and none of these approaches worked.
That’s because they missed one easy clue.
Solution
After 44 minutes, 176k tokens, and zero interjections from me, Fable 5.1 arrived at a solution. It tried a few approaches, but was finally able to solve it with two central realizations.
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