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A cipher created around 1950 by a researcher, built on a method devised by psychologist Robert Thouless, has reportedly been solved. Thouless had outlined the technique in a 1948 paper titled 'A Test of Survival,' which used an unbreakable-without-key cipher system, demonstrated with the phrase 'THERE IS NO DEATH' encrypted using Hamlet's 'To be or not to be' speech as the key.
Carter Church, an engineer at SentinelOne, says he used OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra model to decipher a 1809 coded military dispatch that had remained unread on Cryptiana's list of unsolved historical ciphers. The message, sent from the headquarters of Eugène de Beauharnais to General Auguste de Marmont relaying Napoleon's orders, was reportedly decoded from a single image and prompt within about six hours. Church has published a solution package and script online so others can verify the result.
A historical researcher describes using Opus 5.5 alongside semantic search over the GLOBALISE archive of Dutch East India Company records to locate what appears to be a previously unidentified 1615 Dutch report describing dodo hunting. The method combined prior specialist knowledge of the exotic animal trade with embedding-based search to surface candidate passages, which the model then read and ranked for human review. The account follows a similar case where a researcher used GPT-6 Astra to break a long-unsolved Napoleonic-era cipher.
Developer Prinz used an AI system called GPT-6 Astra to break a 108-year-old encrypted German WWI radio message, one of 50 unsolved ciphers listed on the German site Scienceblogs.de. The AI identified 'TRUPPENVERSCHIEBUNG' as the keyword for the ADFGVX cipher, revealing a warning about a British cruiser arriving at Sevastopol followed by an Allied squadron. Astra cross-checked the decoded date against historical naval logs, confirming HMS Canterbury's arrival in Sevastopol on November 24, 1918, closely matching the message's timeline.
GPT-6 Astra decoded a previously unsolved German WWI radio message from November 27, 1918, one of dozens listed on Scienceblogs.de's catalog of unresolved ciphers. The AI used the ADFGVX encryption method with the key word 'TRUPPENVERSCHIEBUNG,' revealing a report about an English cruiser arriving at Sevastopol and an Allied squadron following on the 26th.
A 1542 ciphered letter sent from Cardinal Alessandro Farnese in Rome to nuncio Giovanni Poggio at Charles V's court has been decrypted using a simulated-annealing algorithm. The eight-page document, held in the Vatican Apostolic Archive, mixed plain Italian text with number sequences that could be read multiple valid ways, making manual decoding extremely difficult. Researchers matched the recovered key to a related cipher table catalogued by scholar Aloys Meister in 1906, confirming the connection to papal secretary Giovanni Ricci da Montepulciano.