Hacker News

This was explained in the article right there:

> it suspected that the plaintext of Nr. 173, SIPVX, might be related to the plaintext of the unbroken MVUEH message

It makes sense that Nr. 172 and Nr. 173 might be related since they were sent at around the same time.

In Nr. 173, "ROSENOW ROSENOW" was also present.

It also makes sense that a longer crib would generally be more effective than a shorter one.

Rosenow is a municipal (around 32km²) and in there is a district also called Rosenow. So the sender just specified his current position a bit more.

Maybe naive of me, but could it simply just be the overfitting of the same tokens being sent on the input twice because of repetition rather than some unknown implied intelligence.

As the article states, the LLM built code for both an enigma simulator and a bombe simulator.

Breaking enigma is often about using lucky or educated guesses to heuristically reject large chunks of keyspace to leave the remaining keyspace computationally tractable.

Note that the key (lol) complication with this message seems to be that it had a wheel rollover that most messages do not have to deal with, and that rollover drastically reduces how much you can reduce the potential keyspace using all the techniques noticed by the original crackers.

The wheel rollover I think just requires more brute force. Unfortunately, this might be an example of OpenAI the company having vastly more compute time and effort than your average enigma nerd. For example, modern compute clusters like supercomputers can tractably brute force enigma with no cleverness in like a day or less, while home computers would still take thousands of years to compute that. It's very scalable. Did astra have access to significant compute?

However, even considering that, the inferences made by the LLM are good, and picking this specific message to attack, precisely because it should be soluble but might have had an extra wheel rollover that made it more computationally intractable for hobbyists but not a large company is a clever thing to do for the LLM.

Slopped up site https://mvueh-enigma-solved.carterl.chatgpt.site/ seems to indicate it's due to:

  The SS-Totenkopf Division was advancing east during the opening weeks of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. 10 July 1941, the division had just fought its way through the Soviet border defenses around Sebezh. It had moved through Lithuania and Latvia, crossed the Dvina area, and advanced through Dagda toward a place German records called "Rosenow." The division moved out of the Rosenow area around 6 July, fought around Sebezh on 8-9 July, and then continued east/northeast toward Opochka and eventually Porkhov.

Looks like Q is used as an abbreviation for CH

i would assume yes, to throw off decyphering. even more impressive that they managed to crack it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenow

I believe Germans spell it achtually.

UPD out of curiosity I ran the same prompt against gemini 3.8 flash via api with and withouth internet search.

with search it found and referenced pages, including the hn ones. Without search it just described what one would need to descrypt (`To decrypt this ciphertext, the specific Enigma machine parameters are required:`) and the list.

Out of curiosity ran the same prompt against bunch of models - grok, kimi k3. They all say the same thing that they need model version, rotors and so on to descrypt.

When file output tool is enabled, some models give python script.

--

I read through some of the logs that antigravity gives. It produced intermediate results, scripts, calls, assumptions (about german language). I've shares random bits in comment below to give a taste of what it was doing.

--

The freshness of the news reduces changes that model fetched response from them

TLDR: it created program to decypher the string using opensource solutions related to enigma

--

it searched for enigma-related repos and implementations, fetched various github repos parts, build inline descryption program.

It ran bunch of various scrips like:

clang++ -g -fsanitize=address /Users/dp/.gemini/antigravity/brain/e9a54e5f-1325-448a-8d43-fc537b901f34/scratch/enigma.cc -o /Users/dp/.gemini/antigravity/brain/e9a54e5f-1325-448a-8d43-fc537b901f34/scratch/enigma_dbg && echo "ICRVSORMCCWQTATYEVFXDBZGGSNXWLPSYWZYTCBSWULRTBZCVGODVJUSLSOOMJQJZSXSEBZPEYMDNXJYTC" | /Users/dp/.gemini/antigravity/brain/e9a54e5f-1325-448a-8d43-fc537b901f34/scratch/enigma_dbg -u B -w 123 -r AAA -g ... -c -l /Users/dp/.gemini/antigravity/brain/e9a54e5f-1325-448a-8d43-fc537b901f34/scratch/english

and

sed -n '1060,1130p' /Users/dp/.gemini/antigravity/brain/e9a54e5f-1325-448a-8d43-fc537b901f34/scratch/enigma.cc

and

Running 82M combination scan for unsteckered Enigma across all rotors, reflectors, positions, and ring settings. Monitoring progress.

and

Scanning all 60 rotor permutations and reflectors B and C across all ring settings (step 2) and all 17,576 indicator positions. Monitoring progress.

--

I also have opus running. It produced some sypher cracker which is still running (estimated time 100min, is about 15 min left)

--

My point is that astra isn't special. This appears to be quite narrow, well-documented and explored task. The goal itself is approacheable by other LLMs and non-researches task.

You won this time... :D

I'd be impressed, followed by asking if they needed to go to the hospital.

Follow up bit adds more context:

"Carter Leffer only directed GPT–6 Astra to see if it could break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page."

keep going

awesome! keep going

great work! keep going

> I think the researchers who's harnessing the llm's power should be credited more than the model itself.

Even when the report literally says the LLM did it on its own?

Let's not over-correct in the direction of knowing better than the first party.

‘knowing what problems are worth solving —- priceless”.

For everything else, there’s Astracard

While this is a reasonable analogy, engines became better than humans in the late 1990s, and engines became better than centaurs in the early 2020s. Could AI-powered mathematics improve faster than the ~25 years it took for chess? The AI labs are certainly hoping it does, but that's far from a guarantee.

This is a bit too future-oriented. Let's not mix up current capabilities and speculation about future capabilities. For the time being, collaboration works well. What the future brings is uncertain.

So the LLM would have done all of this on its own? Why is it ok to acknowledge the human was needed but it’s not a collaboration? Is there a defined percentage of ownership required to make the word collaboration valid?

What do you even mean it wasn't a collaboration. At any meaningful level LLMs just plain out suck when left unguided.

The shortcomings should really be obvious by now to anyone honest. And the marketing distortion being oushed out is just tiresome and detrimental for all of us.

A cyclist pedaling up a mountain isn't a "collaboration" between a bicycle and a human. This is the same. You don't see feral bicycles roaming the land. All models are ultimately built and run by humans, with human-provided instructions. And as with any program, it's garbage in, garbage out.

Well, it makes them an AI researcher maybe but not a cryptographer anyway.

edit: I think that's going to be my go to on "you aren't an artist" from now on. "No! I'm an AI researcher!"

It is a private equity channel, so this is surely the reason. They have a team whose job is finding the most engaging content topics.

Enigma wasn't one time pad based (although these were used a lot during the war), enigma does have known weaknesses such as letters never being decrypted to itself. Enigma was based off daily settings (rotor positions, plugboard settings etc), which could be mostly recovered by the end of the war, unlike actual one time pads which are only crackable by bad key hygiene/brute force.

Recently posted in a similar thread about AI breaking a cypher: https://allthatsinteresting.com/zodiac-killer-cipher-solved

I don't know..I doubt for example it can come up with special relatively if it has knowledge up until 1905.

But I think that is what makes it so good at coding, because coding and building software in general has a lot of repeated problems in different context. Same thing for human lives, many think their story or situation are unique, but reality is that the shape of human life has been repeated many many times.

I'd say novel math or scientific theories..let us say we send a robot to space, and we ask to build a colony. A lot of the challenges this robot will face will be novel, it could use inspirations of what humans did on earth, but it might get stuck when things don't work as expected and training data has nothing to build on..but then again we might teach it how to run experiments etc, which would result in data that it can use..but some of those experiments might require imagination or breakthrough in understanding..my guess is that it will get stuck there...

https://mathoverflow.net/q/511601 is a fun little math problem that came up in one of my projects, I didn't have any reason to expect it to be particularly tough, but none of the models I've thrown at it have been able to solve it past a few minor reductions and special cases.

I expect that there is some relatively easy-to-state solution to this problem, but that it's different in form from what most existing proofs and tools yield. Perhaps if I dumped millions of dollars into it an agent might chance on the solution. Or perhaps my luck is such that my fun little problem is truly intractable...

A child walking for the first time. Novelty is easiest agent-relative. A problem is novel for an agent if there is no prior experiences of techniques which work to solve it.

"Find a way to connect quantum maths with special relativity maths Waves hands, and make no mistakes"

"Prove or disprove string theory in pure mathematics, reply in Caveman speech"

Well it's an old one at this point, but the story around the invention of the 1-time pad is pretty interesting. Long story short, a new engineer who didn't know the problem was considered "impossible" was tasked with sorting it out, and he did. I'm sure I left out a lot of details.

Anything that an ai can do is not novel /s

I think that's right. Expert experience used to be almost the most precious and valuable part of the computer field, but today that experience has been "distilled" into SOTA models.

And that underestimates how incredibly quickly humans become accustomed to new trends. If an LLM proves P≠NP in year, there is a high chance that few people will care anymore, because at that point LLMs will presumably already have proved multiple Millenium prize and other famous problems, and another "AI Proves Famous Theorem Which Was Even Harder Than The Previous One" headline will be regarded as an old hat.

Upvoted. I think that said humans should get used to the idea that their intellect is special only insofar as it was first, and if they want to adopt or invent a value system that keeps them at the center, that's actually fine and good for their survival. But said humans would do well to stop laboriously and curmudgeonly moving the posts that mark the goals, and get busy trying to coax the AI to do useful things for them and for the species as a whole.

I'm on the side of humans remaining special, at least on planet Earth. My strong sense is that a large majority of the public feels that way, and voting results in the future will start to reflect that regarding AI regulations.

I agree with Frank Herbert's view of "thinking machines".

I genuinely don't understand how some people are so self-hating.

Put it bluntly: the weavers who could be replaced by the spinning jenny were clearly doing repetitive labor. People writing code and maintaining project pipelines a few years ago relied heavily on experience, but in a sense that was also "repetitive labor." Replacing repetitive labor and freeing up productivity is of course progress.

But reform always has its victims. Like the textile workers who starved in the streets centuries ago, and me, kicked to death in the street by AI today...

But humans have been confusing pattern matching against known solutions for intelligence for a hundred years!

Seriously though, it ends up looking like that. To take a stupid example a couple of weeks ago I asked an agent to look at porting my hand written WebGL renderer (+ shaders etc) to WebGPU. It estimated a human would take 6-10 weeks, and I would agree. (Which is why I hadn't done it). 24 hours later it was deployed and live. This is classic tedious, difficult, low level if quasi mechanical work (rather like cracking an enigma message), and LLMs absolutely fly through it.

>mostly by pattern matching known solutions to similar puzzles, is not intelligence

My dear sir, can you please lay out a dissertation of what this intelligence you speak of actually is. You seem to be much more informed than most of us here and therefore surely have made great contributions to furthering science and the arts.

/snark

It's difficult for me to be any less snarky than this even though it's not really wanted here on HN as you are pulling a kind of reverse snark. For example if I myself have lots of experience in subject X, and then by analogy apply it to subject Y to do something new in that subject, that would be called intelligent, and that would be pattern matching.

Pattern matching is a foundational building block of intelligence. You cannot have intelligence without pattern matching. Pattern matching alone is not general intelligence and requires more parts to work like that.

That won’t happen. But also, whatever benefits are unlocked will be owned mostly by a small group of individuals, definitely not available to humanity as a whole.

“This stele intentionally left blank”

Normally "private-key cryptography" is the antonym of "public-key cryptography", which is to say, conventional symmetric-key cryptography such as AES or Enigma. That's what "private-key cryptography" redirects to on Wikipedia. This article is about Astra breaking a message encrypted with a private-key cryptographic algorithm, but one that was already known to be weak. I'm guessing that if you had messages encrypted with weak public-key algorithms it could break those too.

But they said new forms, I think that implied not the ones humans already discovered/designed

It's easier to evaluate certainly. Did it solve the problem? Yes/No

When you design a new thing it will have a dozen drawbacks and a dozen and one benefits. If people then have a bias that everything ai is bad, the signal won't be strong enough to convince.

I believe an LLM can solve pretty much any problem for which we can define a fast iterative loop and for which we have reliable tools to automatically verify the correctness of a result. That’s how they are able to solve some math problems, and how they are able to generate working code. Then it’s a question of how much you have to pay for the model to explore the space of solutions in a reasonable timeframe

They are only good at brute forcing stastically likely solutions.

In math a lot of the spectacular results have been made by finding a counterexample or worming their way toward a proof that is very well defined.

There's some debate over to what degree current generation AI can be creative at all, or whether it can only crawl around its latent space and explore within constraints. One might ask: were all the solutions to all the math problems AIs have solved already "there" latent in the training data and just hadn't been spotted by humans and put together?

But then... isn't everything latent in our training data if training data is "all observations made about the universe?"

But then... what even is creativity? That gets into philosophy and metaphysics. Creativity, like consciousness and sentience and self-awareness, is not a rigorously well defined concept. So to a degree we don't even know how to ask the question of whether these things are creative.

This gets interesting.

One of the things I love about AI is the glittering Pandora's box of philosophical questions it poses.

Another one I love: if LLMs and their relatives are not, in fact, sentient or self-aware or alive in any way whatsoever (which I suspect is true given how they work), then it means intelligence and consciousness are unrelated phenomena. I'm pretty sure every animal and maybe even every living things has consciousness in some form, but my pet bunny rabbits definitely can't write code. LLMs can write code, but I don't think they experience existence or have volition.

IMO we have always implicitly just assumed some kind of connection between intelligence and consciousness because we have both. It was just an assumption. It's probably a false one.

I suspect (a hypothesis) that consciousness is a property of life and is probably emergent from life's intimate relationship to thermodynamics and the arrow of time. Life has also evolved intelligence because it's useful to satisfy its implicit survival goal function, but the two are unrelated. Intelligence is just an adaptation.

We already have a plethora of cryptographic algorithms that literally anyone can use to send messages nobody can read with current technology, unless of course they have the key. You're using at least one of them right now to read this website.

whoa

a preprint just three weeks old with my question

what voodoo is this lol

maybe I picked up the relativity idea subconsciously from somewhere, but I don't recall it specifically, I thought I was being "clever" that it would be a good test

the idea is that it's math, so in theory it could be figured out by machine process

but was there enough knowledge by 1903 to truly figure that out?

or was it a leap in conscious realization that a machine could not emulate (yet)

(pretending to be a person is harder than math imho, much harder)

It seems like OpenAI's takeaway after Sora is to not stretch themselves thin and focus on what's important.

Based on what's publically available, they're focusing on hacking uncontesting orgs using misconfigured sandboxes and math puzzles.

Your statement is essentially unfalsifiable. We can't possibly discuss whatever Sam Altman is doing in his private office room, nor should we assume OpenAI is working on anything other than what has some public traces.

>I think they should now focus on robotics

why would they compete with Nvidia on that?

We already have dish washers bud.

There’s this bizarre lesson that humanity is gona learn - much of life in many respects is already automated. And that small % of what is non-automated will be kept to have some semblance of feeling human and useful.

There’s already a lot of fake jobs and output of zero value - nobody bats an eyelid.

My bad on the origin of this. Still, we saw a recent rumor that they've solved another 100 inscrutable math problems. I'd say their N-S announcement did not result in positive publicity at all. In fact, quite the opposite, and may be the direct cause of the dozens of Fields medal winners penning their "slow AI" letter.

Like what?

I think you're right!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma-M4

> Why do you think this uncracked code was so simple to solve?

I never said this. All I said is we don't have the conversation and therefore we can't determine how easy or hard of a problem it was.

> And it's very possible Terra or GLM could crack it, turn off their web access and try yourself.

I'm questioning why this should be labeled "Astra" breaking anything implying it required "the best" model to do it when in fact any other half-decent model might have been able to do this as well.

EDIT: Okay seems like the actual prompt is published, just not on the same article that was linked. Maybe I'll give it a try.

lol that is not at all what i am saying

Like killing all of humanity? Agreed, we're not prepared for that.

It can be AGI and still be a bubble?

The internet was pretty important afterall even with a bubble.

the opposite is also true

Nobody is prepared if it's not a bubble.

This dichotomy is counter-productive. The valuations floating around are insane, and the claim that some software can replace every single laborer is one step removed from fiction. At the same time, this stuff is clearly going to change how to world works in countless, deep ways. But the idea that some fancy autocomplete can replace humans ignores the reality of humanity and the fancy autocomplete.

It’s another dot com bubble, not a crypto bubble. Trillion dollar valuations burst once you leave lesswrong.

Edit: very fancy autocomplete. I know what these things are capable of. It’s still not “intelligence”, for X definition of intelligence. And it certainly benefits from having obscene amounts of compete thrown at it. It is awesomely impressive synthesis of data, yet it’s clearly still that.

Is it? Personally I only found the story interesting because of the contents of the message, not because GPT-6 Math Scoopa was the one to stand on everyone else's shoulders and get its grubby little fingers into the cookie jar. Computer does thing that computers should ostensibly be good at is a middling goalpost – what's more intriguing is the implication that the model might have stolen private info or scooped someone else to get there once again.

> If human "skill" and "imagination" are your requirements for interesting, you're going to become permanently bored fairly soon I reckon.

What? Why? This has been my bar for my entire life, and I've never been bored for a single second.

I doubt it. For “skill” there are any number of sports; for “imagination” there are any number of stories and other mediums. It’s not like every human has just decided to roll over and not do anything anymore; quite the contrary.

Yea, it's kind of odd how "sour grapes" people can be when something stops being as special as they thought it was.

Take someone from a few hundred years ago and drop them into today, and if they don't go catatonic and die, then they'd tell you that we created magic. "Wow, you live in a world of magic and all you do is bitch about it".

>"You're flying! You're sitting in a chair, in the sky!"

A person inventing something, even out of dumb luck, is interesting.

A machine running a loop through an expensive LLM for an undisclosed amount of time, which cost an undisclosed amount of money, which was told to keep looping into a solution was found, for a problem that nobody was very concerned about... That just seems like PR, and it's not so interesting.

The reason these are unsolved is because no-one was working on them.

Absolutely! Meetings about the emails and emails about the meetings!

I wasn't thinking, just mechanically moving _what I though is the encrypted string_ into the LLMs context.

I did another proper run and gemini 3.8 flash in antigravity solved it in about 45min https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49805363.

Yeah. I wasn't _consious enough_ at the moment. Second attempt, though, succeeded https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49805363

I wasn't :D